From: laotse@...
Date: 2001-06-27T21:01:36+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:16963] Re: Method overloading (option) Was: Re:


Well, offering my advice as a highly experienced Ruby developer, who has
been coding in Ruby for two days *grin* ...

If your reasoning is only that type checking on methods would make Ruby
more attractive to Java and C++ programmers (I just joined the mailing
list so I may have missed something) then I would offer the opinion that
that is not enough of a reason for the feature.

I'm assuming that this feature, even though I've never especially had a
need for it, must be a popular one. Even my beloved Perl is moving in that
direction in Perl6, which optional type checking on subroutines.

Personally (and as I said, I'm working on two days of experience here) I
am finding Ruby to be so elegant and uncluttered that I would really want
to see a very strong argument in favor of any new syntax in the language
before it was included.

As an aside, I'd just like to say that I am so happy that a colleague of
mine (an old UNIX hack and smalltalk programmer) recommended to me that I
check into Ruby. I have been getting more into object oriented design over
the last year, and Perl's OO features, while interesting and fun, simply
require too much extra coding. I tried Python for awhile, but something
about it just felt forced and unnatural to me. I tried Java for awhile,
but after coding in Java for a couple of months and discussing how to
implement various things with our senior java programmer, I came to the
conclusion that trying to do layers of abstraction in a statically typed
language was basically trying to pound square pegs into round holes.

Ruby and I just clicked immediately, and I feel that we're going to be
great friends. A big thank you to everyone involved with the language!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Knox
Just Another Perl Hacker
perl -le '$_="6110>374086;2064208213:90<307;55";tr[0->][ LEOR!AUBGNSTY];print'

On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Clemens Wyss wrote:

[SNIP]

> As I said in my initial post I would regard this feature as an
> "appetizer" for C++/Java/...-converts, which often believe that they need
> typechecking (and methodoverloading).

[SNIP]

> On the other hand the question remains, whether my reasoning (see above)
> is sufficient to add such a feature to Ruby?