From: Lyle Johnson <ljohnson@...>
Date: 2002-02-13T00:51:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposed Modification for SWIG/Ruby

> What happens if you change this line to:
>           super()
>
> >         @x, @y = x, y
> >       end
> >     end
> >
> >     d = Derived.new(2.0, 3.0)

No joy; the argument list for Derived#initialize is not the problem. The
inconsistency is in the fact that we're calling Base.new with two arguments
when it's expecting zero arguments. Part of my proposed change for SWIG
would involve rewriting Base.new so that it doesn't make any assumptions
about how many arguments will be passed to it; it just allocates memory for
the object and then passes off the entire argument list to the object's
initialize method. When I was scratching around for some information on this
topic I found a nice post from Dave that describes what's going on under the
hood:

    http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/4707

You can also see examples of this in many Ruby extensions, especially those
in the standard Ruby sources (e.g. ext/dbm/dbm.c).

Hope this helps,

Lyle