From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2002-07-05T21:42:28+09:00
Subject: Re: self_parent

On Fri, 5 Jul 2002 10:04:39 +0900, Tom Sawyer wrote:
> accessible or not, there is a relationship between the two
> objects. the one was created within the other -- the creation-
> parent did in fact create the child and can thus "look down" upon
> the child. as things stand there is no default means to go the
> other way. yet the relationship stands nonetheless. that's why i
> tend to think ruby probably has this information stored within it
> already anyway. so why not make that a useful tool?

I'm sure Ruby could allow this to happen, but except in the case of
XML parsing, I'm not sure I see the utility -- or how it would work
-- except as information.

In XML parsing, it's a relatively safe thing to do because the child
elements will be of the same base class as the parent elements.

What good would it do for Net::POP to know that it has been
instantiated by a particular class? Unless Net::POP has some
relationship other than 'created by' with that class, then Net::POP
can't actually use any of the methods or data that the creating
class offers.

IMO, this makes for too tight a coupling between unrelated classes,
ultimately.

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.07.05 at 08.37.30