From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2007-06-24T05:14:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Error in ancestor?

On 6/22/07, Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/22/07, dblack@wobblini.net <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:
>
> > It's interesting, though, that Matz's reason for not adding K#s_c is,
> > I think, concern about the name of the singleton class (as opposed to
> > wanting it to be obscure).  Hopefully that will be clarified in 2.0.
>
> Well at this point is anyone still vehemently opposed to singleton_class ?
>
> Meta class seems to be falling out of fashion and Eigenclass (sadly)
> never had widespread acceptance.

The problem with metaclass is that it's just one of the two(?) uses of
singleton class, a metaclass is the class of a class, which in ruby
happens to be implemented by a singleton class.

I'd suggest defining Kernel#singleton_class, AND defining
Module#metaclass as an alias which applies to Modules and classes.   I
THINK that it makes sense to think of the (singleton) class of a
Module to be a metaclass.

Were this done, another question arises as to whether e,g, Array.class
should still return Class instead of
#<Class:Array>.  To me this seems different than the case of hiding a
singleton class of an object which is not a Module/Class.



-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/