From: Gavin Kistner <gavin.kistner@...>
Date: 2007-01-05T01:51:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Little Things

From: ara.t.howard@noaa.gov [mailto:ara.t.howard@noaa.gov] 
> i think you guys underestimate the difficulties requiring 
> certain methods imposes.  let's just say you wrote, oh,
> an xml generator using ruby's cool method_missing feature.
> now, you cannot easily have any xml tags that look like
> this
> 
>    xml.ancestors{ 'oops' }
>    xml.class{ 'oops' }
>    xml.display{ 'oops' }
>    xml.extend{ 'oops' }
>    xml.freeze{ 'oops' }
>    xml.id{ 'oops' }
>    xml.method{ 'oops' }
>    xml.new{ 'oops' }
>    xml.send{ 'oops' }
>    xml.taint{ 'oops' }
>    xml.type{ 'oops' }

Thank you for this; despite following this thread (including reading all
of Trans' posts) I had no idea what this 'keyword' bit was that he was
talking about.

My personal opinion:
DSLs are nice and all, but Ruby the language *also* needs to be designed
for...Ruby code. I find the Pervasives concept terrible. If we have
"Pervasives.send", and 'send' and 'new' are in the same boat, then
consistency would require code like:
  my_foo = Pervasives.new( Foo, :bar )
which is insane, in my mind.

You're basically saying, "Anything that is unique to a class you call as
a method using dot notation. But the most common methods...stuff that
glues all objects in the same pool...well, that's not a method of the
object anymore." That's backwards, IMO.

I don't like the idea of __method names, either. It's a pain to type,
and I find it ugly.

If you want a DSL with method_missing, make a truly BlankSlate base
class. Go grab the methods you need and re-bind them under other names
if you must, for your (fun, awesome) crazy metahackery.