From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2004-12-09T09:05:22+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Ruby/Extensions v0.6.0

On Thursday, December 9, 2004, 6:57:28 AM, Florian wrote:

>> The methods added since 0.5 are summarised on the website:
>>   [...]

> Thanks, I was fearing that there would be name clashes with the 
> Ruby-Junction library which defines Enumerable#none, #any, #all, 
> #with_count and #exactly.

You might be interested to know that 'extensions' is careful about
adding methods.  If, for example, you did this:

  class Array; def rand; ...; end; end

  require 'extensions/array'

then you'd get a warning on STDERR, something like

  WARNING: Array#rand exists, not overwriting

But obviously method clashes are better discovered by human
communication than by code.  I'll have to check out the Ruby-Junction
library.

> Array#rand sounds interesting, but I wonder if it does not lead to 
> trouble when using rand() from a custom overloaded Array or Enumerable
> method.

What might an example of this trouble be?  For a start, it's only
defined on Array, not Enumerable.  And its definition is very simple:

  def rand
    idx = Kernel.rand(self.size)
    at(idx)
  end

So any array that properly implements size and at should do the trick.

BTW Florian, while I've got you on this subject, I must apologise for
an incorrect attribution in extensions: Florian Frank appears in there
on one occasion instead of you.  FINR :)

Cheers,
Gavin