From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2005-01-27T00:49:11+09:00
Subject: Re: "Duck Typing" or "No need for abstract classes"


On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> > Duct-taping as a design philosophy is an obfuscation technique.
> No, Ruby's implementation of it is the problem. You can do duck typing
> very much like Ruby does and still have statically checked types; you
> just need a type inference engine to do that for you.

Well, I was not questioning Ruby at all here, but rather, how the current
Ruby together with unit-testing and DRY implies that one should have
something like abstract-classes.

Now if you do have an (already implemented) system that does
type-inference in Ruby I am curious.

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

So you say that this is all "in theory"?

There's a large gap between dream and implementation...

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montr�al QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju