Syntactic Sugar...

Was reading this post about Groovy syntactic sugar... closures and ++ operator are nice... but you could open up Hash and Array to get the other stuff.

[sourcecode language="ruby"]
# working with hashes
class Hash
def method_missing(name, *args)
fetch(name) if has_key?(name) or nil
end
end
user = {:save => true, :destroy => false}
puts "--hashes"
puts "save? : #{user.save}"
puts "destroy? : #{user.destroy}"

# working with arrays
class Array
def method_missing(name, *args)
collect {|i| i.send(name)}
end
end
puts "--upcase"
puts ["Mike", "McKinney"].upcase

# fetching attributes of arrays
name1 = {:first_name => "Mike", :last_name => "McKinney"}
name2 = {:first_name => "Bo", :last_name => "Diddley"}
names = [name1, name2]

puts "--first names "
puts names.first_name
puts "--last names "
puts names.last_name
puts "--middle names "
puts names.middle_name
[/sourcecode]

Of course you would want to look a little closer at the implications this type of patch would have on your code, but it's sure nice how flexible ruby can be.