From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2002-01-24T00:10:54+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby 2.0; rubicon


On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Chr. Rippel wrote:
> "Mathieu Bouchard" <matju@sympatico.ca> wrote in,
> > I don't know. Not sure why Module.constants is useful anyway.
> You can you use them to distinguish constants defined in different
> scopes - so something like #constants_scoped might be more
> descriptive

oh, then that's: (Module.nesting[0] || ::Object).constants

right?

> If you really think about it, by making including transitive (and
> anti-reflexive) you end up with a partial inclusion order, in other
> words an oriented cycle free graph, introducing the same problems
> and advantages of ordinary multiple inheritance

That's not it. The languages known for their mixin inheritance are
CommonLisp and Self, and they do it with an oriented cycle-free
graph. They remove duplicates by themselves. In Ruby it's the same except
that in addition to removing duplicates in a similar way, you can't add
supermodules to supermodules in a meaningful way.

In the real "multiple inheritance" now, you don't have those issues
because you don't have a single chain of supers, which trades some kind of
flexibility for some other kind of flexibility.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                   http://hostname.2y.net/~matju