From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2001-12-11T09:02:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28156] Re: The benefits of dynamic typing?

In article <20011211.105127.461152493.1860@zip.com.au>, "Harry Ohlsen"
<harryo@zip.com.au> wrote:

> You can make this work the way you want (although, you'd have to stick
> this code in a module and "require" it in all your code).  Note that I'm
> not known for writing the simplest version of things, so someone else
> will probably have to clean it up for me (and I've only done the 1 + "1"
> case for Fixnum; it would probably have to be coded more generally to be
> useful) ...

Actually, this makes me wonder ... is there a method somewhere that lets
me find out whether a given object's class is a descendent of a given
class?  If not, one could definitely write such a thing, by running up
the superclass hierarchy.

The reason I ask is that all of the numeric classes are presumably 
derived from some base numeric class, so would that make it possible to
write the Fixnum case I had in the previous post more in a more general
manner?

However, I also wonder how one would do the generalisation.  What class
would I make the change to, in order to catch calls to +() on all objects
of ANY numeric type?  Maybe this just isn't possible, and on would need
to do the same redefinition of +() for every numeric type.

Kind of messy, but I guess if you really want this behaviour, there's a
price to pay :-).