From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-10-30T14:13:30+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23806] Re: ref. constructors and new (was: Re: class Foo does not call Class.new?)

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:23802] Re: ref. constructors and new (was: Re: class Foo does not call Class.new?)"
    on 01/10/30, Dave Thomas <Dave@PragmaticProgrammer.com> writes:

|> Anyway, what does it mean for you, if I pay this price.
|
|For me? Not a lot, really. I like the orthogonality of it, but it
|isn't something I've ever needed.

Orthogonality is my enemy ;-)

|Except once. When I was altering Rubicon to do the tests for MetaRuby,
|it was a pain to do the String and Array tests, because I had to
|change every instance of "str" to S("str") to generate an object of
|the appropriate class. Being able to override String construction
|would have been useful there.

But things are not simple as they appear.  Suppose we call String.new
for string literals, 

  def String.new(str)
     StringSubclass.new(str)
  end

would cause infinite loop, and I don't think there's no easy work
around for it.

							matz.