On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 8:35 PM, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz / ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> I agree with this patch, only when bigdecimal/util is explicitly
> loaded. In fact, I don't want to see no more to_x (x is any single
> character) conversion methods in the core libraries.

It may or may not be germaine to this discussion, but because JRuby
users often want to show their intent to coerce Ruby objects to many
different Java types, we add a "to_java" method on all objects when
Java support is enabled. It accepts one parameter: the type of object
to which the object should be coerced (usually a Java class). A
similar "generic" to_* protocol for Ruby would be nice to have.
Something like #to_any?

- Charlie