Jason Nordwick wrote:
> Of course I don't believe that going from value_at to [] would make
> my code faster, just that it would make it more compact. We started
> using Ruby for some moderately heavy numerics, and I haven't been
> able to be as concise (or productive) as I wish (or thought from what
> others told me).

So define your own implementation! That's one of the things that makes
working in ruby so productive.

class Array
  def [](*args)
    if args.size == 1
      at(*args)
    else
      values_at(*args)
    end
  end
end

a = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
p a[2] # => 3
p a[2,4,6] #=> [3, 5, 7]

Regards,
Jordan