From: William Morgan <wmorgan-ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2005-07-08T05:07:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Inheriting Array and slice() behaviour

Excerpts from Austin Ziegler's mail of  7 Jul 2005 (EDT):
> In an OO language, a slice of an Expression should be an Expression if
> Expression is a descendant of Array.

I'd say that's probably a requirement for a well-written OO Expression
*class*, depending on what exactly it's supposed to be doing.  The
question is whether the language should---or even can---enforce that.

In particular, what if Expression#initialize takes parameters that, for
sub-expressions, need to be determined from some combination of the
receiver's state and the arguments to #slice? That's the situation here,
and it needs to be explicitly handled by the author. Anything Ruby does
automatically will be wrong.

-- 
William <wmorgan-ruby-talk@masanjin.net>