From: Richard Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2004-06-08T23:43:31+09:00
Subject: Expressing intent in method calling...

This is not a continuation of the type thread other than trying to continue
to discuss the ideas of adding metadata that could be used to help the
runtime environment of Ruby.  Before anyone says anything, I have built lots
of Ruby code without this, and the runtime is just fine...think of this as
exploration. Disregard all the other syntax I wrote on earlier...and I do
not care whether something is Hash-like, or is_a? Duck ;-)

  class Person
    attr_accessor :name
  end

  def greet(person)
    puts "Hello there #{person.<Person>name}"
  end

So, greet was coded thinking its sending the 'name' message to a Person
object...and that is expressed with the metadata <Person>.

  o = Object.new
  def o.name
    if called_as?(Person)
      "Rich"
    else
      to_s
    end
  end

You build your object to accept being called as a Person, but it can be
called as anything else too...it just responds to the name method
differently if its being asked 'as a Person'.

  greet(o) => "Hello there Rich"

What this adds is the ability to express the intent of the caller as to what
they mean by sending the message 'name' (ie. name, as in a Person's name).
The receiver can find out the caller's intent (called_as?(Person)).  It also
lets the receiver change into what the caller wants it to be (kinda like
become...one method at a time).

-rich