From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2001-11-30T14:13:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27025] Re: thoughts on virtual base classes, interfaces

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Phil Tomson wrote:

> So I got to thinking that perhaps I could make something like a virtual 
> base class where you raise an exception if 'run' isn't defined in the 
> inheriting class.  But then I thought, "why bother" - Ruby is dynamic, any 
> object which responds to 'run' is going to work.  So perhaps the best way 
> of communicating this to users of the framework (a task distributor which 
> distrubutes tasks to different clients).  So it seems that 
> philosophically, the best way to do it is just to document the required 
> (and optoinal interface) for the classes of objects to be distributed.
> 
I tend to use an "abstract base class" with raise NotImplementedError to
document this. Not for Ruby's sake but as documentation. A smart doc tool
would parse it out and call the class and interface and mark the method as
"virtual" or whatever it should be called.

Regards,

/RobertF