From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2006-10-03T11:03:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Private visibility should be removed from Ruby 2 [was: Caveats with #method_missing]

Hello,

In message "Re: Private visibility should be removed from Ruby 2 [was: Caveats with #method_missing]"
    on Mon, 2 Oct 2006 13:21:27 +0900, "Tomasz Wegrzanowski" <tomasz.wegrzanowski@gmail.com> writes:

|Having a single well-defined interface was a big win for Smalltalk.
|Ruby is almost there, but not quite. What is the reason for Ruby
|to have "almost-Smalltalk" object model ?

Because Ruby is not Smalltalk.  Really.

Let me elaborate a bit.  Since I made the syntax of Ruby more
traditional than Smalltalk's "everything is a message passing" style,
you can write traditional code in Ruby, for example:

  print "hello world\n"

rather than

  "hello world" printIt.

or something like that.  If everything procedure is a method, what
should I do?  There were several choices, and I chose "print" to be a
method with implicit receiver, but made it "private" to detect weird

  "foobar".print "hello world\n"

as an error.  If you want to remove "private" from Ruby2, I expect
your proposal addresses the above issue.

							matz.