From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-07-26T12:43:26+09:00
Subject: Re: I'll have the duck!

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 dblack@wobblini.net wrote:

> I've always felt that the Achilles' heel of the duck typing metaphor was the
> "then it *is a* duck" -- which implies that there's a Duck thing out there
> which something else can "be".

i was thinking about this on my ride home and recalled a term used in damian
conway's object oriented perl book (a fastastic book on oo programming btw.)
and a term he used way back then : 'interface polymorphism.'  the more i
thought about it the more i like the term better than 'duck typing' because
it's closer in spirit to the idea of something being an acceptable object
merely by implimenting (via method_missing or whatever) a certain set of
behvaiours.

2 cts.

-a
-- 
suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama