From: Mark Wilden <mark@...>
Date: 2008-05-30T22:23:05+09:00
Subject: Re: The duck's backside

On May 29, 2008, at 1:49 AM, F. Senault wrote:

> Le 29 mai à 06:45, Eleanor McHugh a écrit :
>>
>> Numeric may well mean "numeric" in some particular sense, but that is
>> only a subset of all objects which may have a valid numeric
>> representation. As I said, you're applying a static typing mindset to
>> a place where it's not necessary and whilst Ruby will let you do  
>> that,
>> in the long term you'll find yourself doing much more work with very
>> little (if any) gain in software robustness.

Man, I'm really not giving these replies the attention they deserve,  
but I did want to mention one thing:

This has nothing to do with "static typing." "Static typing" refers to  
type checking being performed at compile-time instead of runtime. It  
has nothing to do with interrogating an object's class during the  
execution of a program. If you think about it, the class of an object  
is _continually_ being interrogated at runtime, in order to dispatch a  
given message to the right method.

///ark