From: Christoph <chr_mail@...>
Date: 2005-05-09T10:21:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Singleton class terminology

David A. Black schrieb:

>
> Some more thoughts:
>
> What I do like about the "class" in "singleton class" is that it fits
> so beautifully, from the object-handling point of view, with the rest
> of the design. By which I really mean that I would not want to see
> some completely new category or concept introduced, cut adrift from
> the basic language design and its familiar idioms, just for the sake
> of not calling it something familiar, even if calling it that is a bit
> of a stretch.

Very, very nice point:-)

>
> I'm concerned about a proliferation of concepts and terms: class,
> module, new thing.... I'm not in agreement with Matju about unifying
> classes and modules, but on the other side of the equation I think
> having a completely separate concept to deal with the housing of
> singleton methods and constants (and, presumably, new keywords
> and syntax for getting access to them) would run a serious risk of
> clutter.

I am sort of neutral on Matju's unification - however if we must
have separate concepts I just don't see why the class Class (in its
current form) is a subclass of Module, besides implementation
convenience?

I�d rather subclass both from Object directly and stick the common
reflection methods in a separate Module e.g.

class Module < Object
include MethodKernel
end

class Class < Object
include MethodKernel
end

/Christoph

>
>
> David
>