Re: new method dispatch rule (matz' proposal)

David Flanagan wrote:
> In Ruby 1.8, we can write code like this:
> 
> class Test
>   def initialize(greeting)
>     @greeting = greeting
>     @greeter = lambda { |x| puts "#@greeting #{x}" }
>   end
> 
>   def greet(x)
>     @greeter[x]
>   end
> end
> 
> t = Test.new("hello")
> t.greet("world")
> 
> In this code, the instance variable @greeter refers to a local function 
> that is completely hidden from subclasses and cannot be altered.

class Test2 < Test; end
t2 = Test2.new("hello")
t2.greet("world") #=> "hello world"

How is this hidden from subclasses? Or did I miss something?

But this touches on an idea I was thinking about recently... how about 
giving a warning when a subclasses overrides a method and doesn't use 
"super"? IMHO in 99% of cases if you override a method you should call 
super. In the other 1% of cases you could use an idiom like "super if 
false" which makes it very clear when reading the code that we are 
(dangerously) skipping the normal inheritance chain. It solves the same 
problem as the new method dispatch rule but for *both* public and 
private methods, while still leaving the programmer freedom to override 
private methods if he knows what he's doing. Comments?

Daniel