[ruby-core:82371] [Ruby trunk Feature#13805] Make refinement scoping to be like that of constants

Issue #13805 has been updated by wardrop (Tom Wardrop).


jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans) wrote:
> You probably want to read the very long issue that introduced refinements (#4085), which contains the reasoning.

I thought there'd be one of these long discussions floating around, thanks for the links. Didn't find a lot of discussion on why refinements weren't implemented as module-scoped. The discussion pretty much started off as being lexically/file scoped. Either way, ~4 years on and with refinements now in the wild for some time, it's definitely something worth raising again in my opinion.

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Feature #13805: Make refinement scoping to be like that of constants
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/13805#change-66166

* Author: wardrop (Tom Wardrop)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
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Refinements are currently lexically scoped, which makes their use burdensome when one wants to apply a refinement to an entire project, requiring boiler plate at the top of every project file. I propose that there ought to be a method of applying refinements to an entire namespace (module), similar to how constants are scoped.

For example, here's a trivial example of how one is able to scope a new RuntimeError class inside a module.

~~~ ruby
# a.rb
require 'b'
module MyProject
  class RuntimeError < ::RuntimeError; end
end


# b.rb
module MyProject
  class SomeClass
    def initialize
      raise RuntimeError, "Application error occurred" # Raises MyProject::RuntimeError exception
    end
end
~~~

Could refinements be scoped in a similar way, without the requirement for the `using` clause in every file. For example:

~~~ ruby
# a.rb
require 'b'
module MyProject
  refine! String do
    def exclaim
      self + "!!!"
    end
  end
end


# b.rb
module MyProject
  class SomeClass
    def initialize
      puts "Hello".exclaim # Outputs "Hello!!!"
    end
end
~~~

I believe this would be an intuitive means of making refinements global to a project, which seems to be a highly desired feature, and something that needs to happen to mostly eliminate monkey patching. Of course, using the `refine` name would clash with the current behaviour of refine and break backwards compatibility, so I'd propose introducing `refine!` as an alternative to invoke this proposed new behaviour.

Apologies if this has already been proposed/discussed. I did search for similar proposals, but couldn't find anything. I'm interested to hear what some of the potential pitfalls of this would be.



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