From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-06-26T12:43:08+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:16875] Re: Something strange with Ruby's inheritance mechanism

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:16869] Something strange with Ruby's inheritance mechanism"
    on 01/06/26, Eric Jacoboni <jaco@teaser.fr> writes:

|In Ruby, it's legal to assign an Manager to an Employee with
|
|anEmployee = aManager
|
|anEmployee is now a Manager... I know Ruby doesn't care about type
|checking and i'm aware of the fact that both names are references,
|but, when it comes to classes, it hurts my inheritance conception. Is
|there a way to avoid this behaviour or is it a "feature" ?

 aManager = anEmployee

is an assignment between two symbols (local variables), which has no
relation with inheritance here.  It's called dynamic typing.  Back in
late 80s, I had to explain static typed OOPL.  Things have changed
since then.

							matz.