From: Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2011-01-20T07:35:44+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:34629] Re: [Ruby 1.9-Feature#4288][Open] Allow invoking arbitrary method names with foo."something" syntax

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Gary Wright <gwtmp01@mac.com> wrote:
> Maybe I'm crazy, but could I suggest something a little more general?
>
> �� foo.{expression}(arg1)
>
> to have the same semantics as
>
> ��foo.send(expression, arg1)

I don't want something that just resolves to doing "send" under the
covers. I want this code:

foo."something"()

to parse identically to:

foo.something()

What I want is purely a syntax-level quoting mechanism for method invocation.

> I've always found the use of Kernel#send for dynamic method dispatch to be a bit awkward and would prefer something that was syntactically similar to static method dispatch rather than the current dependency on the 'magic' behavior of Kernel#send.

I agree, but "send" also changes things in subtle ways. I just want a
way to specify a syntactically "unfriendly" method call and have it
actually resolve to a plain old CALL, FCALL, or VCALL (in MRI AST
parlance).

FWIW, there have been proposals to add this sort of "symbolic freedom"
to Java method invocations using a similar form:

foo.#"something"

- Charlie

> Perhaps a syntactic approach to dynamic dispatch would enable more interesting optimizations since it would be clear that something 'interesting' was going on rather than just a generic method call to a magic method like Kernel#send.

If you mean that the above syntax would actually parse to those
literal call names (rather than bouncing through send) then I have no
objections. I feel like foo."something" is cleaner, though, and the {}
immediately says "block" to me. If that was your intent...I think
that's going a bit too far :)

- Charlie