Many values can be a string, object, or list

[jpstroop]

See 5.3. Should we try to handle this gracefully, e.g. to avoid:

irb(main):005:0> f = 'foo'
=> "foo"
irb(main):006:0> f << 'x'
=> "foox"

? We could assume everything is an Array and then change to a single String or Object when we serialize if there's is only one member.

• But what are the implications for marshaling/unmarshaling?
  • Every value that isn't an array would need to become one when we unmarshal (parse)
• Accessors and mutators would need to initialize lists internally, so
  ruby def foo=(value) data['foo'] ||= [] data['foo'] << value end def foo data['foo'] ||= [] data['foo'] end
  And []= and [] would need to be overridden with the same behavior.

This feels like it breaks Ruby. If I say x = 1 I want x == 1, not [1], and I want << to behave as expected based on the type I'm working against. Better you just know your data.