[ruby-core:48078] [ruby-trunk - Feature #7121] Extending the use of `require'

Issue #7121 has been updated by wardrop (Tom Wardrop).


I personally don't mind your suggestion. It makes sense to me. I can't think of any potential negative side effects. On that note, I think the return value should always be a boolean, instead of a boolean OR an array of booleans depending on the input. #require should return true if any of the listed files were loaded, or false if none of them were. If you need to determine the loaded state of each file (the lesser common use case I'd imagine), then you should resort to looping over multiple calls to #require.
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Feature #7121: Extending the use of `require'
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7121#change-31029

Author: mjones (Morgan Jones)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: 
Target version: 


=begin
I was playing with Ruby tonight and thought up an interesting idea to make (({require})) a bit better, so you can load multiple files sequentially using one method call.

Currently, (({require})) supports one argument, and throws a (({TypeError})) if you pass an array:

 irb(main):001:0> require %w(json yaml)
 TypeError: can't convert Array into String

However, there's a way to patch Kernel that makes it respond to multiple objects passed in an (({Array})).

 module Kernel
   @@require = method :require

   def require *args
     args.flatten!
     args.collect! do |a|
       raise ArgumentError.new "arguments to `require' must be strings or symbols" unless a.is_a?(String) || a.is_a?(Symbol)
       @@require.call a.to_s
     end

     args.length == 1 ? args.first : args
   end
 end

The new behavior doesn't actually require the modification of any code that calls (({require})) (pretty much anything, really), and new code can take advantage of the new functionality instantly.

 irb> require %w(json yaml)
 => [true, false]
 irb> require :pp
 => false
 irb> require 'rails'
 => true
 irb> require %w(json yaml), :pp, 'rails'
 => [true, false, false, true]
=end

Thanks for considering this.


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