On Mar 1, 2007, at 5:30 PM, James Edward Gray II wrote:

> I would check for to_hash(), then call that method on the argument  
> to get its Hash representation.
>

That might work but what if the object is an interface to some sort  
of database?  You don't
really want to convert the external data structure into a Hash just  
to access a single item.

Gary Wright