From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2008-12-06T01:02:17+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20377] Re: Behavior: autoload calls rb_require() directly

On Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:25:42 +0900, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:

> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> I mentioned about fragility just because that will be an issue for Ruby
>> 2.0.  For MRI replacing core methods affect less, just because core
>> functionality is done by C functions.  But implantation like Rubinius
>> suffers more.  I think we will soon need to start discussing
>> separating/protecting core implementation from user code by some kind
>> of namespaces or packages.
> 
> I agree. There's no practical reason anyone should be able to override
> Fixnum#+, after all, and protecting the core simplifies implementation
> and optimization too.
> 
> - Charlie

There's plenty of reasons why someone might want to override Fixnum#+.

First: mathn.rb overrides Fixnum#/, and that's in the standard library

Second: many people had the same argument that there was no practical 
reason to override the != operator separately from the == operator. It's 
something I wanted to do for DSL support (specifically, turning a block 
into an s-expression and then from there into SQL). Thankfully, this 
reasoning won out in Ruby 1.9 where I can now override != and !. (As it 
happens, my sexp19.rb does override Fixnum#/ for just this reason.)



-- 
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/