Re: method names in 1.9

Hi --

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:

> David Flanagan wrote:
>> IIRC, the reason for a visiblity-honoring method is so that if your intent 
>> is to invoke a (public) method that is part of a published API you won't 
>> inadvertently invoke a (private) implementation-dependent helper method 
>> with the same name defined by a subclass.  You fail fast with an exception 
>> rather than getting unexpected behavior that comes from calling the wrong 
>> method.
>
> I thought it might be something like that. For that purpose, invoke_method 
> seems reasonable, since it does say to me "please invoke this method as 
> though I were calling it", and I'd expect the same rules to apply.

But "calling it" still really means "sending a message to the object";
there's always that double articulation. It would be tiresome to make
oneself say that all the time, but for these somewhat low-level
operations, where one is manipulating messages/method-names
symbolically and explicitly sending them to the object, I prefer not
to have the message/method distinction concealed.

"call_method" would, I think, be better than "invoke_method". It
suffers from the same problem, but I've noticed that people tend to
translate "invoke" to "call" in describing it anyway, so at least it
would be closer to the most common terminology. It still feels like it
requires translation or dereferencing, so to speak, before it
expresses precisely what the operation is doing (unlike "send").


David

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