From: Adelle Hartley <adelle@...>
Date: 2005-03-26T18:42:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Instead of templates

Hi Mathieu, 

> class A
>   @special={}
>   def self.of(t)
>     @special[t] ||= Class.new(self) { @mytype=t; ... }
>   end
> end

That's a neat idea.  I think I will keep that up my sleeve.  I am bound to
need it.

> 
> Where "..." may be any specialisation-specific code, e.g. an 
> eval that recreates some methods in a speed-optimised way 
> depending on t.
> 
> Does that make sense?
> 
> However I have no experience combining regular inheritance 
> and this technique, and I know this technique may be 
> difficult to combine with regular inheritance in a way that 
> makes it really closer to C++.

Your technique already combines regular inheritance - all of your A.of(t)
classes inherit from A, so any method defined in A will be inherited by
A.of(t).  My question (and Robert gave a good answer on how to do this) was
one degree more complicated because I not only wanted the child classes to
have their own implementation but wanted any classes that inherit from
*them* to have their own implementation as well.

> Btw, what's the class A<<MyBaseClass syntax? AFAIK it's 
> either class A<MyBaseClass or class<<A. Is this a new syntax?

Heh, that's just air coding gone bad.  << is not used for inheritance in
Ruby (AFAIK).

Adelle.