From: John Carter Date: 2005-12-06T12:08:19+09:00 Subject: Re: Subclassing Class. On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, David A. Black wrote: > On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Aredridel wrote: > >> Each Class (and indeed, every other object) has its own private class, >> for just that object alone, the eigenclass. It can have methods added to > ^^^^^^^^^^ > > Is there any chance of stemming the tide of nicknames and coined synonyms > for singleton classes? Hmm. It's perfectly standard mathematical terminology for an operator A, if you can find a limited subset of items e_i such that A operating on item e_i results in the same item e_i (upto a scalar factor), then the e_i are called an eigenstate of the operator A and the scalar factor is the eigenvalue. This usage of the term "eigen" is far far wider than ruby and far far older. If this usage maps in some fairly clear manner onto singleton classes then clearly the term singleton class should be dropped in favour of eigenclass. The question then is "Is there an operation which leaves the singleton classes, and only the singleton classes, unaltered (except perhaps in some trivial fashion)?" John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : john.carter@tait.co.nz New Zealand Carter's Clarification of Murphy's Law. "Things only ever go right so that they may go more spectacularly wrong later." From this principle, all of life and physics may be deduced.