From: Florian Gilcher <flo@...>
Date: 2008-08-01T02:14:31+09:00
Subject: Re: How to do methodsoverloading in

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On Jul 31, 2008, at 1:08 PM, David A. Black wrote:

> Hi --
>
>
>> But the brevity sort of goes out the window if every method has to
>> paranoidly check the class of every parameter passed to it. It's a  
>> bit
>> of a pain.  But so is the alternative.
>>
>> I gather from what David says that there's no magic bullet...?
>
> There are two reasons not to check the class of every parameter:
>
>  1. It doesn't work, because objects aren't limited to the behavior
>     defined in their classes.
>  2. It stops you from thinking more flexibly about how to leverage
>     the power of Ruby objects, rather than smothering it.

I really liked you talk at EuRuKo about that topic which illustrated  
quite
well why "type" is a convention that should not be overused in a
dynamic language.

For this interested, it should be available here:

http://www.avc-cvut.cz/avc.php?id=6882

(offline at the moment, i contacted the EuRuKo-guys)

But I do think that splitting methods into clauses depending on argument
patterns is a thing thats really missing in ruby (or most OO- 
languages), because
it solves the problem of not being able to change behaviour of proxy  
methods
without reimplementing the whole method.
Be aware that I am talking about arbitrary patterns here, not type  
patterns. [1]

Regards,
Florian Gilcher

[1] For those of you that where at the EuRuKo 2008 and heard my talk:  
my library
accomplishing this task is not ready at the moment because i have  
absolutely no time.
If someone is interested in code that is in alpha state, drop me a  
line. 
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