From: Fearless Fool <r@...>
Date: 2010-07-06T05:30:44+09:00
Subject: extending a core class cleanly [noobish alert]

Assume I'd like to create a statistics package designed to work on
Arrays [but see P.S.].  One way to do this would be to create functions
that take an array as an argument:

  def mean(array)
    return NaN unless array && array.size > 0
    array.reduce(0.0) {|accum, val| accum + val} / array.size
  end

... but that's so old school.  What I'd really like is to *cleanly*
extend the Array class so you can operate on it directly, as in:

  >> [1, 2, 3].mean
  => 2.0

I'm sure that it's considered bad style to simply open the Array class
and extend it, since that can lead to unexpected user surprises:

  class Array
    def mean
      return NaN unless self.size > 0
      self.reduce(0.0) {|accum, val| accum + val} / self.size
    end
  end

My hunch is that the stats functions should be wrapped in a module and
then included (extended?) when desired.  But despite reading the
tutorials and docs, I'm not sure what's considered the stylistically
correct way (and the syntax) to package that up.

Comments?  Pointers?

Thanks!

- ff

[P.S.: Before you tell me about available stats packages, etc, note that
I'm only using statistics as an example.  My real question is about
extending a class...]
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