Differences between literals and constructors? ([] vs Array.new and {} vs Hash.new)

Question

I was curious to know more differences between [] and Array.new and {} and Hash.new

I ran same benchmarks on it and seems like the shorthands are winners

Answer 1

With Hash.new you can set the default value of the hash for unset keys. This is quite useful if you're doing statistics, because Hash.new(0) will let you increment keys without explicitly initializing them.