From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-05-02T12:15:56+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:14530] Re: Overloading Constructors.

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:14527] Re: Overloading Constructors."
    on 01/05/02, "Florian G. Pflug" <fgp@phlo.org> writes:

|> Oops, I forgot that initialize was private method.
|>   conn.__send__(:initialize, *args)
|> or
|>   conn.instance_eval{initialize(*args)}
|> 
|> would do.  Just "initialize" would invoke the method of the
|> DbConnection class.
|Why?

Because the "self" within "new" is class DbConnection, not an INSTANCE
of DbConnection.  Plain "initialize" calls the method of the receiver
(this case DbConnection itself).  I hope I explained clearly.

|Even if this is the case normally (this would make sense, given that all
|methods are what is kind "virtual" in c++), this seems to be exactly the
|place where the Mysql-Constructor fails. Otherwise it wouldn't be necessary
|to overload "new", but I could just overload "initialize".)

"class methods" work differently in Ruby and C++.

							matz.