Phillip Gawlowski wrote:
> Tom Cloyd wrote:
>
>> Phillip, good research begins with careful observation - in this 
>> case, of the materials at hand. In my immediately previous email I 
>> pointed out that the ruby core documentation, for which I gave a 
>> reference, so you could check my accuracy (basic scholarly method), 
>> tells me that Object#to_yaml should be available to all object unless 
>> "explicitly overridden". I then present some cases where it isn't 
>> available. That contradiction is what I could not explain. I do not 
>> expect such a blatant error/omission/contradiction - or whatever - in 
>> the ruby core documentation. If I can't trust what it says about the 
>> root object of all objects, then what can I trust? That, to me, looks 
>> like a problem - and not exactly one I'd expect Google or some blog 
>> entry to solve.
>
> You do know, however, that the state of Ruby's documentation on the 
> web is rather bad. Which creates faulty assumptions, as you've 
> noticed. ;)
>
> And yes, something like this is something a blog entry (or, more 
> generally speaking, a blog entry) can solve, since you more likely 
> than not aren't the first person to have this problem.
>
> Unfortunately, the only way to get a reasonably up-to-date 
> documentation for Ruby is via Programming Ruby (and maybe The Ruby 
> Programming Language), which also provides usage examples. The free 
> edition of the Pickaxe is slightly out of date (as has been mentioned 
> elsewhere).
>
> The trick is, that you are standing on the shoulder of giants. Tapping 
> into that, can make Ruby much more hassle free (and I've ran against a 
> wall when using Ruby's documentation myself, hence my fondness for the 
> Pickaxe).
>
> -- Phillip Gawlowski
>
>
Agreed - with all. And I own a copy of Pickaxe 2nd ed., in marvelous 
searchable PDF format (highly recommended). However, the to_yaml method 
is not documented in the discussion of the Object class - it's not 
reasonable to expect EVERYTHING to be covered, I'm sure.

An exhaustive search of the book reveals only that to_yaml_properties is 
discussed at one point, and in the context it appears to be related to 
the YAML standard library, BECAUSE a require is used, and what I was 
recently taught (on this list) is that core library doesn't have to be 
required, AND the online documentation says that to_yaml is core. With 
the information I have, at this point, I'm not clever enough to think my 
way out of this confusion.

Just wanted to make it clear that I did do a fair amount of due 
diligence before bringing the problem here.

t.


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Tom Cloyd, MS MA, LMHC
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