18:18 <Petruchio> Hi. I'm puzzled about to_s behavior. I have a class, X, where I define to_s. I call puts on an x, and to_s gets called. If I call puts on an array of Xs, or an array of arrays, it gets called. If x is a value in a hash, and I puts the hash, to_s doesn't get called. Not sure what rule governs this.

18:20 <Petruchio> I also have the sense that it worked the way I expected in earlier versions (presently using 2.7.2), where to_s was called more consistently, but I'm not quite certain.

18:28 <weaksauce> it appears hash#to_s is an alias for inspect while other ones are not

18:35 <Petruchio> Well, it looks like Array#to_s is also: https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.7.2/Array.html#method-i-to_s

18:38 <Petruchio> I guess there are a few levels to my question. One is: how can I predict the behavior? Another is: why is this behavior a good idea?

19:25 <weaksauce> i always thought inspect was more of a debugging thing Petruchio

19:25 <weaksauce> or what was called by p

19:25 <weaksauce> so i'm not sure why that was merged

19:25 <weaksauce> maybe there is a bug somewhere that highlights this?

21:04 <nakilon> Petruchio you can detect aliases

21:06 <nakilon> https://stackoverflow.com/a/6560873/322020

21:06 <nakilon> a.method(:reduce) => true

21:06 <nakilon> a.method(:inject) == a.method(:inspect) => false

21:07 <nakilon> a.method(:inject) == a.method(:reduce) => true

21:07 <nakilon> (ignore the first copypasta line)

21:07 <nakilon> one guy just recently asked it in another place

21:08 <nakilon> I can't teach them come to IRC ..(

21:09 <nakilon> this gives you the whole list of aliases of a class: require "pp"; a = []; pp a.methods.map(&a.method(:method)).group_by(&:itself).map{ |m, g| [m.name, g.map(&:name)] }.sort_by{ |m, g| -g.size }

21:09 <Petruchio> Well, that's clever and interesting.

21:10 <weaksauce> fun