From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-08-28T13:45:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:4617] Re: Class methods

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:4608] Class methods"
    on 00/08/28, Mark Slagell <ms@iastate.edu> writes:

|Reading the thread about regexp matches made me wonder about this:
|
|  def File.read(s)
|    File.new(s).read(nil)
|  end
|
|Then File.new("filename").read(nil) could be written more simply and
|readably as File.read("filename") -- rather like "atime" is implemented
|both as a class method and an instance method.  Are there reasons not to
|do such things? (more methods => performance suffers, perhaps?)

Well, I don't want to provide every method of IO/File as a class
method like readlines/mtime.  It's too clumsy.  I'd like to provide
useful ones.  I felt that the method to open file and read a leading
fixed sized content from it, then close the file, is not quite useful.

But IO#read provides the feature to read whole content too.  Now, I
feel the class method to read whole content may be useful.  Although,

  File::open(s).read

will do the job (unclosed file will be closed by GC).  

							matz.