✔ to_str · ideas · Zulip Chat Archive

Stream: ideas

Recently submitted an issue regarding to_str method on builtin types. The feedback I got was that we have Str.inspect at home. The reason I wanted to_str is that it's hard to chain inspect because it's on Str type rather than the type of the type I'm actually using.

Anton (Dec 30 2025 at 16:27):

That's a valid point! @Richard Feldman is probably the person who is most aware of all the trade-offs here.

Richard Feldman (Dec 30 2025 at 18:43):

you can do ->Str.inspect to chain it!

nandi (Dec 30 2025 at 18:43):

TIL

Notification Bot (Dec 30 2025 at 18:44):

nandi has marked this topic as resolved.

Anton (Dec 30 2025 at 18:59):

Richard Feldman said:

you can do ->Str.inspect to chain it!

Perhaps .to_str would be worth it because it is easier to discover?

Richard Feldman (Dec 30 2025 at 19:11):

I should probably write about this somewhere, but philosophically the idea behind this design is:

when you just want to debug print something or write it to a log (so, not to be displayed to end users), that should be super easy - Str.inspect accepts any type and does that, without anyone needing to do anything
if you're making a new type and want to customize how it looks with Str.inspect, there's a method you can opt into defining to do that
there's no conflation of "display to end user" and "display for programmer internal use" - which there is with to_str