Re: What's so special about operators, built-in classes and modules?

On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Daniel Brockman wrote:

> "Ara.T.Howard" <[e-mail]> writes:
>
>>> That is a reasonable belief.  Indeed, I'm not completely
>>> sure myself that unification would reduce net confusion.
>>> So I'd be interested in seeing some arguments.
>>
>> well - classes can't [extend objects] [...]
>
> Is that an argument in favor of unifying them?

i don't think so.  the reason is that if classes could extend objects we'd
have a real issue with ancestors/inheritence.  what i mean is that if one
could

   class A
   end
   class B
     include A
   end

and this were the 'same' as

   class B < A
   end

then that __would__ be confusing since including multiple classes would imply
multiple inheritence.  if it did not imply multiple inheritence would the only
difference be that one (B < A) made b.is_a?(A) true while the other (B.include
A) did not - even though, for all intents and purposes they could do all the
same things.  this seems broken and confusing either way - tough i'll admit
the idea is interesting...

> I agree.  My point is that Ruby's classes and modules are
> very much alike.

execept - and this is important - wrt inheritence.

> were very much alike, I'd be in favor of unifying them.
> But since the two pointer types are not alike at all, your
> analogy doesn't apply.

and i'm saying they are not that much alike because on this crucial
difference.

> Documentation in always nice, but I'm afraid the quality of
> the documentation is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

requiring people to understand the language fully, regardless of what that
takes, before attempting to change it is never really irrelevant is it?

>> and, in the end, certain people are simply going to have
>> to be told to rtfm
>
> Granted.
>
>> not everything can be intuitive AND powerful.
>
> But realize that what I'm saying is that Ruby is *not* more
> powerful with classes and modules separate than it would be
> with them unified.  I'm saying that Ruby would be equally
> powerful (nay, more powerful) after the unification.

well - if you can work out how inheritence would work out - then maybe.
realize that i'm one of those people that think that normal hackers cannot
handle multiple inheritence anyhow and that, at the very least, it's an idea
far less powerfull than mixins.

cheers.


-a
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