From: Kaspar Schiess <eule@...>
Date: 2010-04-19T15:27:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Life without Method Overloading?

Hi,


> Or is there a common way Ruby programmers handle this?

There are some common patterns, like what you find in Rails for example:

http://railsbrain.com/api/rails-2.3.2/doc/index.html?a=M002313&name=find

I think overloading is very much attached to static typing and not as 
useful in dynamic languages as it seems. Creating more methods is free 
and generally more expressive. Polymorphism is implicit (look up what we 
call 'duck-typing' here). I find that I rarely have the need for 
overloading in Ruby (or that I overload all the time, depending on which 
way you look at it - no type signatures means that you can pass in 
anything at all) - and when I need it, I use the rails-kind named 
arguments.

greetings,
kaspar