From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-05-26T23:51:57+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:15760] Re: Ruby Programming Practice

On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 12:40:05PM +0900, John Kaurin wrote:
> But in a general Ruby programming view, where one programmer
> is controlling all the files, is it good practice for a superclass to
> use a method (or instance variable) defined by a derived class?
> This does not seem to follow from the library designer view.

Well, I'd say that this is not good programming practice.  Better would
be to define an interface for the method:

class A
	def methodA
		methodB
	end

	# Override this method
	def methodB
	end
end

Or document that class A expects that subclasses will import a given
module.  Probably the best thing of all would be to make A a module,
rather than a class.  The difference is almost one of semantics, but
conventions often determine what is "good" and what is "bad".

--- SER