Re: Confusion about arities

Eric Hodel wrote:
> The information is there, but I don't see a way to automatically make 
> sure it is correct for MRI/YARV.
> 
> I don't think this is an area where you need to maintain compatibility.
> 
>> What good does Method#arity do if it isn't the actual arity being 
>> enforced? From the Ruby side, it doesn't help to know the C arity 
>> number. In JRuby now, every method stores required arg count, optional 
>> arg count, and whether rest args or a block arg are accepted, and 
>> those values are used to calculate the appropriate arity.
> 
> I agree that its not helpful for the C methods.  It would be easy to 
> fix, but I don't know how to automate it so that it is always correct.
> 
>> Is it not possible to get -2, -3, -4 etc arities from Method#arity?
> 
> Currently, for ruby methods you can get -2, -3, etc, for C methods you 
> can only get -1.  See method_arity() in eval.c

Ok, I understand now.

In our case, I've gone through the whole core API and provided 
annotations in the Java code to specify required/optional counts and 
whether there's a rest argument. This was partially for argument 
processing, but also to allow automating arity checking. Because of that 
we can present actual arities for all methods, including those written 
in Java, so we'll probably opt to have all methods present correct arities.

Couldn't the C code also bind methods this way, specifying the correct 
arity at bind time? It doesn't seem like arities would change that often.

FWIW, an example method, equivalent to rb_ary_aref:

@JRubyMethod(name = "[]", name2 = "slice", required = 1, optional = 1)
public IRubyObject aref(IRubyObject[] args) {
  ...

With this annotation, binding the Java method to both names and 
enforcing appropriate arity is all automatically generated.

Thanks for the help.

- Charlie