[ruby-core:51913] [ruby-trunk - Feature #7792] Make symbols and strings the same thing

["rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas)" <rr.rosas@gmail.com>]

Issue #7792 has been updated by rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas).


Although I'd really prefer that symbols and strings were the same there is an alternative that would satisfy me as well:

Make Hash behave as HashWithIndifferentAccess and create a new class StrictHash to keep the behavior of the existent Hash class. That way this would work:

a = {a: 1}; a[:a] == a['a']

Also any stdlib libraries, such as JSON, should use Hash instead of StrictHash on unparse.

That way it wouldn't really matter if {foo: 1} maps to {:foo => 1} or {'foo' => 1}. By the way I'm still curious to know if we'll ever be able to use string interpolation in the hash syntax, like {"#{'foo'}": 1}.
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Feature #7792: Make symbols and strings the same thing
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7792#change-35912

Author: rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: core
Target version: Next Major


Recently I had to replace several of my symbols to plain strings in my project. Here is what happened:

I generated some results with some class that would add items to an array like this:

results << {id: 1, name: 'abc'}

Then I would store such results in cache using Redis, encoded as a JSON string. But then when I restore the data from cache the hash will be {'id' => 1, 'name' => 'abc'}.

This wasn't a problem until recently because I never used the results directly in the same request before and would always use the value stored on Redis and parsed by JSON.

But recently I had to use the values directly in a view. But then I had a problem because I would have to use symbols in the results for the first time and strings the next times when the result was available on cache. I really don't want to care about memory management in Ruby if possible and symbols forces me to abandon the new sexy hash syntax many times. Now I have to write

results << {'id' => 1, 'name' => 'abc}

when I'd prefer to write

results << {id: 1, name: 'abc}

This is not the first time I had a bad user experience due to symbols being different from strings. And I'm not the only one or ActiveSupport Hash#with_indifferent_access wouldn't be so popular and Rails wouldn't use it all the time internally.

It is really bad when you have to constantly check how you store your keys in your hashes. Am I using symbols or strings as keys? If you use the wrong type on plain hashes you can find a bad time debugging your code. Or you could just use Hash#with_indifferent_access everywhere, thus reducing performance (I guess) and it is pretty inconvenient anyway.

Or if you're comparing the keys of your hash in some "each" closure you have to worry about it being a symbol or a string too.

Ruby is told to be programmers' friendly and it usually is. But symbols are certainly a big exception.


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