From: Clemens Hintze <c.hintze@...>
Date: 1998-12-01T16:21:16+09:00
Subject: [ruby-list:11156] How to delete methods from superclass?

Hello,

first sorry, that I use English for that list. But I'am a German and I
don't speak Japanese very well (well, I don't speak it at all, except
some words ;-). 

As I am very interested in Ruby, and there is no other mailing list than
yours, I have to ask my question, which arise from time to time, here. I
hope that's okay for you all. I don't want to bother matz with every
simple question :-)

Well coming to my problem/question...

I have written some modules in Python. I want to rewrite them in Ruby,
and contribute them. Also I want to translate some Python modules to
Ruby, as I think they are very useful (BTW: Congratulations for the
translation of the sgmllib.py and htmllib.py, very nice).

Now I have a class which supports file locking via lockfiles
(filename+".lock"). As some modules (e.g. mailread.rb) assume, that a
real file would be derived from IO, I have to derive my LockedFile
class from IO too. But in real that is not necessary! (BTW: One
remark! As Ruby is typeless, I think it should not be necessary to
force any instance of type IO or subclass in such cases. I think in
OOP it should be taken as: If it behaves like a File, take it as File!
Regardless whether it is a Array or whatever!). Every method call which
LockedFile does not know, will be delegated to a composite @filep which
is a real File.

So now I have the necessity to remove all methods, coming from IO
without removing, of course, of LockedFile's own methods. I would like
to know a "automatic way" to do that.

Does anybody know such a way? 

But nevertheless I would propose to remove such requirements for
derivation from IO. It would make things much easier. And it is not
really necessary for a OOPS. The next module I want to translate is the
module StringIO from Python. I would not like to derive it from class
IO, as it has nothing to do with I/O. It only fakes things a little
bit. But with the current scheme, I have to derive it from IO :-(

What do you all thing?

Greetings,
Cle.

PS: Sorry about my lousy English.