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And they are neat. It’s just one of those really simple changes to Ruby that walks the tightrope between being a very elegant addition and being not worth anyone’s time ever.

Supposedly unleashed at last RubyConf by the sublime and blemish-free Rich Kilmer, numeric suffixes took the form of methods to Fixnum. Stuff like 12.hours, which returns the number of seconds in a twelve hour period, availing you of having to use the unseemly 12 * 60 * 60. You can find this syntax in the new Rails 0.9.4.

If you like this idea, then you’ll probably dig flgr’s patch to Ruby, supplied a few weeks ago on Ruby-Core, which adds numeric literal suffixes to Ruby. His patch adds f and b suffixes to Ruby’s number parser.

 >> 5.1b
 => #
 >> 1f
 => 1.0

The ensuing thread isn’t acknowledged by Matz, but a few ideas are kicked around for adding 45min or "10:00"pm or similiar suffixes which could make for a very friendly flavor of Ruby.