From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2011-02-01T00:00:00+09:00
Subject: Re: why is overloading invalid in ruby.


On Jan 31, 2011, at 5:16 AM, Shadowfirebird wrote:
> Or, indeed, the practical case - at the very heart of Ruby is the idea of duck typing.  Duck typing rules out method overloading, because parameters would have to have set types before you could have a signature.  Presumably no-one is suggesting that we should have fixed typing in Ruby?
> 

I think the original poster provided an example of overloading based on the number of parameters but not their type.
Even restricting yourself to overloading by arity is a bit problematic in Ruby because the arity still has to be determined (in some cases) dynamically:

args = [1,2]
foo(*args)      # two arguments
args << 3
foo(*args)      # three arguments

Gary Wright