From: "Alexander E. Fischer" <aef+news@...>
Date: 2010-07-07T22:05:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Global methods in Ruby standard lib

On Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:52:25 +0000, Alexander E. Fischer wrote:

> I noticed that at least some of the standard libs use global methods to
> provide some kind of shortcut to the actual new method. For example the
> excellent Pathname class' objects can be generated either by
> 
> Pathname.new('/home/someone')
> 
> or simply through
> 
> Pathname('/home/someone')
> 
> The latter example is possible through a method on the Kernel module,
> which is named capitalized.
> 
> module Kernel
>   def Pathname(path)
>     Pathname.new(path)
>   end
> end
> 
> I think this shortcut is really useful, but also very ugly in its
> implementation. If more classes do this, especially classes outside of
> the class library, the global method namespace, which is already filled
> with a lot of things, will become overcrowded. In the end there will be
> naming collisions because of a lack of sub-namespacing. To discourage
> this behaviour I would recommend to remove those global methods and
> implement the whole thing in a slightly different fashion:
> 
> class Pathname
>   def self.[](path)
>     new(path)
>   end
> end
> 
> This implementation would allow this:
> 
> Pathname['/home/someone']
> 
> which is still very near to the current variant but more eco-friendly in
> my opinion.
> 
> If there is no big problem about this (tell me, if you see one!) I'm
> willing to add the new methods in affected classes (at least the
> standard lib classes Complex and Rational use this, too) and add a
> deprecation warning in the old methods. Then I would submit this as a
> patch.

Sorry for the repost. Do NOT use this thread to discuss. Use the other 
thread called "Global method usage in standard libs" for your answers.

Thank you.