From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2005-01-25T20:54:51+09:00
Subject: Re: "Duck Typing" or "No need for abstract classes"

Hello Curt,

CS> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

CS> Of course, creating something like this is much harder in a language
CS> like Ruby where objects are ever-changing and ever-malliable. But even
CS> for Ruby it should be possible to do it at least to some extent, falling
CS> back to exceptions at runtime if you're doing something tricky (such as
CS> adding and removing singleton methods on an object on the fly).

100% ACK.
As a toolwriter i often get requests: I want a good working
refactoring browsers, where are the code tooltips,
can't you integrate a ruby lint etc.

These tools all need a type inference engine and this is a huge task.
If someone wants to start with it perfect. I really want to see the
heuristics that are used. And i really hope that ruby gets some common
agreements how to write type assertions very soon.

I recently read an article on www.smalltalk.org about the python
typing extension. It's bad to see that so many people don't understand
that this technique can be optional and some hints are much better then none. We
don't need to be able to specify everything, but in most cases it's
very easy and very helpful to do so.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's