From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2006-08-14T00:45:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Tim Bray (Sun Microsystems) on Ruby

On Aug 13, 2006, at 4:43 AM, Xavier Noria wrote:

> On Aug 13, 2006, at 10:35 AM, zoat wrote:
>
>> The Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems jumps  
>> directly to
>> the conclusion about Ruby. "For people like me, who are proficient in
>> Perl and Java, Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive."
>> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/24/Ruby
>
> Just for the archives, at the end of the post it reads:
>
> "Finally, a minor, almost a footnote, issue. I miss polymorphism.  
> In particular, I miss polymorphic constructors."
>
> but Ruby does have polymorphism. I guess he means "method  
> overloading" (which can be partially mimicked with default arguments).

Hmm, I would say you would mimic this by accepting any number of  
arguments:

   def initialize(*args)
     if # check args.size and type...
       init_with_whatever(*args)
     elsif # check args.size and type...
       init_with_whatever_else(*args)
     else
       raise ArgumentError, "#{args.inspect} not a supported call."
     end
   end

You could generalize this into a library, of course, and I'm pretty  
sure people have.

James Edward Gray II