Hi,
>1) methods have multiple functionalities based on the types
of
>the arguments (usually exact class not just respond_to?).
Usually using duck types, for example "to_str" for
string-like
objects. It it's not, I consider it a bug.
Having the the method take any object that implements the to_s
is good duck typing, but then we get right back to static
typing as soon the the built-in methods use the result of to_s
- they require it to be a string. Having many of the built-in
methods do a to_s is nothing more than a convenience (you could
easily do the same thing by putting a .to_s appended to those
arguments). It doesn't really help the arguments be more
polymorphic. If I had a class that implemented all of the
String methods, it wouldn't be any good to the built-in classes
- to_s would still have to return an actual String, not self.
But, this wasn't really what my #1 above was about. It was
about overloaded methods where the functionality is determined
by looking at the type of the arguments. One example would be
String#[arg]:
str[fixnum] => fixnum or nil
str[range] => new_str or nil
str[regexp] => new_str or nil
str[other_str] => new_str or nil
All of these behave very different. The way you figure out
what to do is based on type - which goes against the
duck-typing philosophy. I think the only advantage of
combining all of these functions into one method is
convenience. But, by doing so you loose the ability to handle
more general duck-typed/polymorphic arguments.
I think the = method has a more legitimate excuse for the
amount of overloading - a syntactical one - because there is no
other way to make a method that can be assigned to and have
arguments (other than the rvalue). RCR #307 would help solve
that issue.
>2) even where a method only has one functionality (or the
>multiple functionalites are determined by means other than
arg
>type/capabilities - flags, number of args, etc), many/most
>built-in methods can't take args that have the same
>capabilities as what is excepted - they only take a certain
>type or maybe one derived from it.
Example, please?
matz.
I think a primary example where I would really like real
duck-typing in a built-in would be Regexp#match(str). This
requires the arg to be a String. I would really like to have
this be able to operate on a file. If I implement a class that
walks like, talks like, quacks like a String but really
accesses a file (practically did that in my rubyforge cursor
project), it wouldn't do any good because Regexp#match only
takes a String - period.
The Regexp#match method could be implemented to take ANY object
that implemented a some subset of the String API. Now you
might say that would be really slow, but you could just make
that functionality. Implementation-wise, you could special
case when the object in a String and do a much faster
implementation (but functionally the same as the general
version). A side effect of doing it this way is that you'd
have two implementations (with a String arg) that should be
functionally equivalent and thus great for testing (could be
put in a self-checking mode).
Eric
···
--- Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org> wrote:
In message "Re: [RCR] array or with non-array" > on Wed, 3 Aug 2005 07:34:27 +0900, Eric Mahurin > <eric_mahurin@yahoo.com> writes:
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