From: seebs@... (Peter Seebach)
Date: 2007-05-26T20:40:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Forward references?

In message <3a94cf510705260432r5157b607wae9cd16ce61aa6a7@mail.gmail.com>, "Fran
cis Cianfrocca" writes:
>The fact that "Foo::Bar" is undefined in Foo#initialize doesn't matter to
>Ruby's parser. The whole notion of "forward references" is really more at
>home in languages that build symbol-tables at compile time. Ruby just deals
>with the names themselves.

	class A::B
	end
	class A
	end
	--> t.rb:1: uninitialized constant A (NameError)

So I can't just do them in ANY order.

>Two possible reasons: you want to segregate them textually to make your code
>easier to read, or you want to support multiple definitions of Bar, to be
>determined at runtime. In either case, you can place the require statements
>where it makes the most sense for the user of Foo. You can defend yourself
>against Bar being required ahead of Foo by coding it like this:

The rationale was essentially to segregate them textually.  I like
having moderately self-contained things in separate files, even if they
have some necessary cohesion.

Hmm.

I had the brief notion of writing
	module A
		require 'b.rb'
	end
and ending up with a class named A::B, but B ends up outside
of A anyway.  So much for my clever idea.  :)

-s