From: Henrik Martensson <henrik.martensson@...>
Date: 2006-01-09T17:50:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Ideas on "Why Living Dangerous can be A Good Thing" in Ruby?

On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 23:47, Steve Litt wrote:

> 
> If someone can show me an advantage to adding methods and instance variables 
> in real time, and that advantage can't be realized with normal OOP 
> techniques, I'll keep an open mind. But unless it offers me a unique benefit 
> that I need, I wouldn't do it.

I recently wrote some code where I had to retrieve an attribute from a
REXML attribute list  based on its name and namespace. The REXML
attribute list does have a method for retrieving attributes based on
namespace prefix and name, but this is not very useful. A namespace
aware XML processor, such as an XSLT processor, can, without breaking
any rules, change prefixes at will. 

I couldn't just subclass the attribute list, because the REXML parser
would not use my subclass when building a node tree from an XML
document. However, I could do this:

module REXML
  class Attributes
    def get_attribute_ns(namespace, name)
      each_attribute() { |attribute|
        if name == attribute.name &&
          namespace == attribute.namespace()
          return attribute
        end
      }
      nil
    end
  end
end


Which enabled me to write code like this:

actual_attribute =
actual_attributes.get_attribute_ns(expected_namespace, expected_name)

I could have solved the problem with an external helper class instead,
but that would, in my opinion, have been a clumsier solution.


/Henrik

--

http://www.henrikmartensson.org/  - Reflections on software development