From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2001-12-22T06:14:19+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29258] AdjectiveNoun class names (was: Re:  Re: Why is UnboundMethod a subclass of alias_method)

Hi --

On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> For your information, it's almost historical reason.  I developed
> Method (BoundMethod) first, not knowing UnboundMethod was possible.
>
> If I was introducing both BoundMethod and UnbountMethod at the same
> time, it might be
>
>   Method
>     BoundMethod
>     UnboundMethod
>
> or might be as you said
>
>   UnboundMethod
>     BoundMethod
>
> due to my less-class-ism.

Picking up on something from #ruby-lang, which itself grew out of
this: namely, the question of class names that have adjectives and
nouns together.

It came up on #ruby-lang when I made the comment that I don't like
them :-) Whenever I see such a name, I always feel like there's a
coupling that (ideally) shouldn't be there.  The adjective part of the
name feels like it's expressing something which should be an
attribute, and/or should be in a module.

I guess -- really just "thinking out loud", not claiming great cogency
-- that in the case of ((Un)Bound)Methods, this would mean having
things like:

  if m.bound? ...

and such, which I know is very different but which feels better to me
because it puts the weight on the behavior of the object rather than
an adjective in the class name.

I'm not (necessarily :-) lobbying for this to be rethought in this
particular case, especially since I'm not very knowledgeable about
this area.  But out of general interest I'm curious whether other
people have this reaction to names like this.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav