From: steve ross <cwdinfo@...>
Date: 2013-03-07T07:21:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Refinements. Am I doing Something wrong?

This is kind of a bummer. I have a gem that I'd like not to make dependent on some other arbitrary gem(s). (Yes, I know rubygems is a dependency manager.) In any case, to avoid pulling in all of ActiveSupport, I implement my own flavor of Inflector. And I put a few keen methods on String like String.singularize and String.pluralize...

All well and good until some other library with some other implementation of these String extensions gets pulled in.

So using what I thought refinements would be, I could have done:

module CoreExtensions
  class String
    def singularize
      # something here
    end
  end
end

class MyConsumerClass
  using CoreExtensions
  
  def do_something
    puts "dogs".singularize
  end
end

This would magically have scoped my String extensions to the CoreExtensions module, preventing any namespace pollution, while at the same time allowing include-like access to these extensions within my class.

File scope is ok, but nowhere near as precise as module or class scoped refinements.

Just my $.02.

On Jan 10, 2013, at 5:13 PM, Intransition <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:

> Refinements were altered (pretty much at the last moment) to be *file* scoped. So that's why `using` only makes sense at toplevel.
>