Graham Wideman wrote:
> Robert:
> 
> Thanks, and...

You're welcome!

>> Right.  You got it.  That's what OO is about.
> 
> Well, I already had the OO part, just needed the ruby version of it :-) plus 
> connecting the dots might help others stumbling along this way, and you 
> never know it might turn out that your "consistency" comment was referring 
> to something else I didn't see.

I probably should have put "encapsulation" somewhere in that posting. 
:-)  Anyway, I'm glad I could help sort these things out.

> Anyhow, this discussion has been most helpful to alert me to all the 
> capabilities that Array has, and calibrating my sense that a little bit of 
> assembly required to implement collections with various features, they're 
> not just in some library that "of course" everyone knows about and  uses :-)

Yeah, the reason is probably that Array and Hash are so powerful on the 
one hand and that requirements are so different on the other hand.  Java 
follows a tad different approach by providing collections for usual 
situations.

Kind regards

	robert