From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2002-08-06T17:46:15+09:00
Subject: Writing a method that's added to both Fixnum and Bignum

A mate of mine just asked me an interesting question.  He had written a method 
that extended Fixnum and then realised that he wanted it to work for Bignum 
as well, but the code is obviously identical.

The only way I could think of to do this was something like ...

class Bignum
   def Bignum.fred(x)
      # Do the calculation with x
   end

   def fred
      Bignum.fred(self)
   end
end

class Fixnum
   def fred
      Bignum.fred(self)
   end
end

There HAS to be a better way to do it, but I just can't think of it.

Effectively, what I would have thought it should be is something like ...

class Bignum
   def fred
      # Do the calculation on self
   end
end

class Fixnum
      # Coerce self into a Bignum, say "b" and then return b.fred
end

But I can't think of how I would coerce the Fixnum into a Bignum.