Matju asked:
> >Do you wish to have an equivalent to Data::Dumper in Ruby?

Yes I do. And pluggableness would be a great thing. As would be a good
handling of recursive data structures. And a Data::Loader.

And then we're approaching modularised and pluggable Marshalling. A great
thing indeed.

There's already XMarshal somewhere at Japanese sites (actually google told
it's at http://www.goto.info.waseda.ac.jp/~fukusima/ruby/xmarshal.html ).

Ben said:
> I would find that very nice if it was able to handle
> recursive data structures.  One of the key things
> that I use Data::Dumper for is to debug the situation
> when two places in the same data structure are
> references to the same thing.  The debugging output
> in Ruby does not currently do this...
> 
> If it doesn't then for the most part, the built-in
> functionality with "p" is good enough for me.

I'm not entirely following you here, Ben.

ruby -e'class Foo; attr_accessor :foo; end; f = Foo.new; f.foo=f; p f;'
#<Foo:0x4017aa90 @foo=#<Foo:0x4017aa90 ...>>

I've used this many times to check how my classes are really built from.

I even recall extending p's functionality with some simple hack, which makes
the output of p even friendlier. (Somewhere at ruby-talk archives...)

Anyway, I know the pain you might be referring to, as for example simple
test for arrays does not work out:

  ruby -e'b = ['b']; a = [b]; a << a; p a;'
  [[nil], [...]]

	- Aleksi