From: Alexander Schofield <pcs3@...>
Date: 2002-02-26T02:04:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Style Question

Ron Jeffries wrote:
> So what I've got now is that Sets are created by factory methods such as
>   Set.create(anArray)

> Of course (he said, after finally figuring it out) this means that no
> one can do Set.new(anything), because that will implicitly call
> initialize and MUST return an instance of Set, which is illegal because
> Set is abstract. I guess that's OK with me.

Well, I've heard criticism of this before, and it might have been
changed for 1.7, but in 1.6 this works fine:
irb(main):001:0> class C
irb(main):002:1> def C.new
irb(main):003:2> [super, 3]
irb(main):004:2> end
irb(main):005:1> end
nil
irb(main):006:0> c = C.new
[#<C:0x45fd4a8>, 3]


> and so on. So my question is, is this good style, and if not, what would
> be better? Recall that the clients of Set should never need to know
> about any of the concrete classes.

I'm not about to give style advice to Ron Jeffries, but
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubycollections might be of interest to
you.

HTH
-- 
Alexander Schofield