From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2002-09-11T07:33:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Christoph wrote:
> "Yukihiro Matsumoto"  wrote in
> ....
> 
>>Multi-method is kinda like multiple inheritance.  It is *natural*
>>extension of the original concept.  It is theoretically clean.  But it
>>is easy to make thing too complex with them.  Only smart people can
>>use their full power.  If you see no problem, it's because you're
> 
> 
> Why, shouldn't I use something if I am not smart enough to use (or
> understand) it to its fullest extend. A lot of people are using C++, Pythons
> multiple inheritance and I doubt that they are all geniuses ...
> 
> 
>>smarter than me. ;-)
> 
> 
> I guess not seeing any problems translates into being foolish (well
> I am a complete fool anyway;-) ... seriously trying to bolt multi-dispatch
> onto Ruby might turn out to be a complete disaster or something
> really wonderful?

It might be interesting to write a GenericFunction class in ruby to 
which you can add member methods (actually, procs). A generic functions 
would be callable like a proc, and would dispatch to the member methods 
based on the tuple of argument types. You can assign them to constants 
in a module to approximate the behavior of CLOS.

Of course this wouldn't help in the infix case that's been discussed, 
but there have been situations in my Ruby code where I would use such a 
beast.