From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2011-06-24T04:07:47+09:00
Subject: Re: RFC - One word alias for require_relative

On Wednesday, June 22, 2011 10:25:37 PM Ilias Lazaridis wrote:
> On 21 Ιούν, 21:55, Iñaki Baz Castillo <i...@aliax.net> wrote:
> > 2011/6/20 Ilias Lazaridis <il...@lazaridis.com>:
> > >> False.
> > > 
> > > [...] - (not readed, 'cause it's anyway biased babbling)
> > 
> > Sorry???
> 
> If someone is usually not concise and straight to the point, and
> "wraps" technical information with personal-level babbling, then I
> simply stop to read him.

Yet take the time to post "Babbling", without actually confirming that it was. 
Still, I didn't even write as much "personal" stuff as in this paragraph, or 
the paragraph I quoted above. I just responded directly to your points.

When you do the same...

> > the given argument is really GOOD:
> Ok, I'll take a look:
[snip]
> In that case, the bang-name "require!" would not be adequate for
> "require_relative".

...when you do the same, we get somewhere.

> Possibly it would be easier to add behaviour of "require":
> 
> require "./filename" #=> loads relative to $Dir.pwd (process working
> directory)
> 
> require ":/filename" #=> loads relative to the file-directory
> 
> Possibly there's somewhere a standard for this.

That's not a bad idea.

I still don't see the point of having this over require_relative, and we can 
no longer require files which begin with a colon character. It certainly seems 
less readable than require_relative, especially when I usually read a colon 
prefix as "Symbol".

Still, it at least doesn't break much (who has a file named :foo.rb, really?). 
So, just for fun, here's an implementation:

  module Kernel
    def require_with_colon path
      if path =~ /^:(.*)/
        require_relative $1
      else
        require_without_colon path
      end
    end
    alias require_without_colon require
    alias require require_with_colon
  end

Or, to pollute the namespace less:

  module Kernel
    require_without_colon = method :require
    define_method :require do |path|
      if path =~ /^:(.*)/
        require_relative $1
      else
        require_without_colon[path]
      end
    end
  end


I'll still be using require_relative, myself, but if people end up actually 
using either of the above, I'd think that'd be a good case for getting it into 
core, if that's what you want to do.