Folk,

I have a class which delegates for Integer, and wants to behave as much
like a real Integer as possible (except for being able to be subclassed).
It *mostly* works... but falls foul of Ruby's various hacks, errors, and
internal optimisations in the Fixnum and Hash classes.

In particular, the Hash implementations work (and break!) differently in
MRI, Rubinius and JRuby. It's documented to use only #hash and #eql?,
but that's not always true (sometimes these have hard-wired optimsations).

The Hash documentation does not say whether #eql? will be called only on
items in the hash, or only on keys being used to probe the hash. It should
be one or the other, since a.eql?(b) might not always mean b.eql?(a).

Please peruse this code: <https://gist.github.com/906998>, try it on the
various Ruby versions, and also try it with the Fixnum monkey-patches
removed.

You'll see that the behaviour is very unpredictable.

Clifford Heath.