From: Richard Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2004-06-09T03:40:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Expressing intent in method calling...




On 6/8/04 12:11 PM, "Jeff Mitchell" <quixoticsycophant@yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> --- Dave Thomas <dave@pragprog.com> wrote:
>>>   class Person
>>>     attr_accessor :name
>>>   end
>>> 
>>>   def greet(person)
>>>     puts "Hello there #{person.<Person>name}"
>>>   end
>> 
>> Isn't this effectively "to_name" or "as_name"?
> 
> Whether it's name or to_name, he is seeking a way to differentiate
> person names and Nonlinear Altitude Modulation Expositors.
> 
> To use an example from your book, he wants to distinguish
> between Action#sin and Trig#sin.  He can "let it ride" and see
> what happens by just calling #sin, but I think the motivation
> behind these threads is to provide support for methods/interfaces
> which claim some conformant behavior.
> 

Well, not necessarily conformant behavior.  Its so the caller can express
what they are expecting the behavior to be, and receiver then making use of
that or not.  I am not 'casting' the receiver to a Person nor asking the
runtime to check to ensure that it is a Person, I am allowing the receiver
to understand something of what I want it to do beyond a simple symbol/param
list...instead its a namespaced symbol/param list, which may disambiguate
the request.  The receiver can check on the supplied namespace (if present)
and act accordingly.

I guess the reason for this is we already have namespaces (modules/classes)
and methods in them...there is just no way to use the namespaces to add
meaning to a method requests.

-rich