[ruby-talk:19553] Re: order and freedom in Ruby (was: Re: Re: the wayclass variables work)

"Nat Pryce" <[e-mail]> writes:

> It depends what you mean by "significant meaning"... :-)

:)  

> Inheritance has no relationship to type in Ruby (or Smalltalk or
> other dynamically typed OO languages).  Type is defined by, and only
> by, the messages that an object understands at any given
> time.

Exactly.

> Inheritance is merely a convenience mechanism for reusing some or
> all of an implementation defined by another class.  Inherited
> implementation can affect the type of objects instantiated from the
> derived class, but that can be overridden at any time.

Yes, it's a temporal relationship.  Just like humans, we inherit genes
from our parents, but we can come out VERY different.  Unlike humans,
a ruby object can change its genes.

> In Ruby, instead of defining classes or interfaces, you define
> protocols that objects should speak, and define those protocols
> outside the language.

This is interesting.  What distinction do you make between protocol
and interface?  Can the protocol be independent from the interface?

> You can then define useful classes or modules that implement those
> protocols, but a programmer can just as easily write the protocol
> from scratch.

Yes, in that regard, every ruby function is like a C++ function
template.  (Gotta make those C++ comparisons...!)

  template <typename T> void foo(T arg) { /*...*/ }

Rather than an "interface" which is a fixed, hard coded set of
requirments, of which perhaps only a subset is actually used,
templates use what they call the "concept" approach.  ANY arg can be
passed in provided that it supports all the necessary concepts which
the code places on it.  (The difference is a compile-time check is
made, rather than runtime.)

> An simple example of this kind of protocol is the relationship
> between the methods hash and eql? or the Enumerable mixin requiring
> the existence of the each method.

These are good examples.  Do you think that when we write Ruby code
that this type of mindset should be the primary kind of issues we
think about?

How would you suggest we recover when an argument does not support the
protocol?  Since Ruby is dynamic, object x may not support it now, but
if you try again later it might.  Or vice versa.

There certainly is an element of uncertainty introduced along with all
the dynamic capabilities.  The trick is keeping it balanced to where
you can know what's going on but still have flexibility.

I still have this uneasy feeling, though, that nothing can ever be
completely trusted, because perfectly working code can easily be
broken by other code in another file which is completely unrelated to it.  

It seems you have to really know everything that is going on in a
program to know if it's going to work.  Though there are Modules to
kind of separate things, it's not truly modular since if your code and
mine are running in the same program, my code can break yours, and
vice versa.

The risk to me is not all just type, but behavior too.  In a big
application it's unreasonable to expect everyone to study every line
of every file that everyone else is working on.

So when someone modifies the behavior of Array class such that []
becomes 1-based, for example, he breaks MY working code, which hasn't
changed. 

-- 
Chris