From: Mark Hubbart <discordantus@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T02:55:53+09:00
Subject: Re: adding a dynamic method handler? (long post)

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:56:34 +0900, Sam Roberts <sroberts@certicom.com> wrote:
> Wrote Robert Klemme <bob.news@gmx.net>, on Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 06:19:50PM +0900:
> >
> > "Mark Hubbart" <discordantus@gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> > news:de63abca0502152303763354f7@mail.gmail.com...
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I've been using method_missing overly much in my code lately, and it's
> > > prompted me to think a lot about it's limitations.
> >
> > <snip/>
> >
> > > So, any thoughts?
> >
> > I'm wondering in which situation you need this.  Although I understand the
> > benefits of your approach I don't see the use case for this.
> 
> I think I see what Mark was getting at. As I understand it, if I defined
> a proxy object that used method_missing to forward all method calls to
> an underlying object, I could call
> 
>   proxy.to_ary
> 
> and if the underlying object was an Array, this would work.
> 
> However, if I passed that into a library that was using duck-typing, and
> that lib did
> 
>   proxy.responds_to? :to_ary
> 
> the answer would be false. So, my Array proxy doesn't look as much like
> an Array as it needs to.
> 
> Do I understand correctly?

Yes, that's the general rationale I had for this. Getting more of the
reflection methods to work for dynamically defined methods.

cheers,
Mark