On 9/28/06, Dr Nic <drnicwilliams / gmail.com> wrote:
> I like this idea too - something that allows you to pick which iterator
> method to use (that is: select, each, map)
>
> Implementable syntax might be:
>
> %w{the meaning of 42}.map_length

FWIW I really prefer the magic underscore over anything else.

The pluralization thing has too much potential for collision and looks
jarring (to_as looks to me like "to" "as", which doesn't make any
sense; then again I'm not a fan of programmatic pluralization for any
reason, since it's very western-language-centric and far from
foolproof (moose? virus? fish?)).

The magic dot has a potential to create scads more objects to handle
the adapting. With a magic dot, list.map.to_i necessarily has to
create some adapter object for the call to map so there's a receiver
for to_i where no object was required before. Unless Ruby is adding a
pretty powerful GC in the future, perhaps we should avoid adding tons
of transient objects just for the magic dot.

The magic underscore has far less potential to cause a collision and
requires no intermediate objects to be created. And as others have
mentioned, it's been proven to look and feel really nice by
ActiveRecord.

-- 
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Charles Oliver Nutter @ headius.blogspot.com
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