On Jan 11, 2011, at 10:12 , Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:

> 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

I find #to_any a bit confusing as in "12".to_any(Integer). Why not just call it #to?
Also, I like the idea.