From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2001-11-30T04:35:10+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26951] Re: overload possible?

In article <200111291631.fATGVQu20572@sharui.nakada.kanuma.tochigi.jp>,
"nobu.nokada" <nobu.nokada@softhome.net> wrote:

> At Thu, 29 Nov 2001 14:05:00 +0900,
> Rich Kilmer <rich@infoether.com> wrote:
>> excellent idea...how about this refactoring...
> 
> I thought up another trick.

>   class Fred
>     def hello(*args)
>       case args = Signature[*args]
>       when Signature[Fixnum, String, Float]
> 	i, s, f = args
> 	puts "(Fixnum, String, Float) -> [ #{i}, \"#{s}\", #{f} ]" "1"
>       when Signature[String, Fixnum]
> 	s, i = args
> 	puts "(String, Fixnum) -> [ \"#{s}\", #{i} ]" return "2"
>       else
> 	raise args.invalid
>       end
>     end
>   end
> 
>   f = Fred.new
>   f1 = f.hello(123, "hello", 123.456)
>   f2 = f.hello("hello", 123)
>   f3 = (f.hello("abc", "def") rescue $!)
> 
>   puts "f1 = #{f1.inspect}  f2 = #{f2.inspect}  f3 = #{f3.inspect}"

To me, this is a perfect syntax for it !!  I might even pass that one by
the person who pointed me at the perl multimethods stuff that he thought
was realy nifty ... it's nowhere near as neat as this :-).