From: "Florian Groß" <florgro@...>
Date: 2005-04-04T09:39:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Hash::MixIn and Python style Object#dict

Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

>>But I wonder: why both you and florian considered the need to have 
>>contracts for this mixable things?
> 
> Because it helps distinguish responsibility in case of incorrect
> behaviour, so that a bug can be located more easily. There's a similar
> argument in favour of type-checking in general.
> 
> A way of working that many duck-typers have adopted is to just ignore
> those things, so that all failures happen at the lowest possible level
> instead of the highest possible one, producing error messages that are
> meaningless in terms of the highest-level. Somehow they treat this as a
> nonissue (and I don't want to speculate on why that is).

One thing I don't quite like about duck typing is that is applied where 
it does not make sense to apply it.

Even the "If it quacks and walks like a duck it can be handled like a 
duck" is an odd one. First of all duck typing never checks the "like a 
duck" part. It also isn't correct to handle something that does a few 
things like a duck like a duck. You can handle it like something that 
does a few things like a duck. That's all you know.

The other area where I feel it is getting misused is calling 
.respond_to?() duck typing. I think that duck typing has always been 
about not checking, but rather just doing.

I guess views will widely differ on this subject and I'm not even sure 
if there is one authorative source that could clear all these different 
interpretations up...