From: Matt Gushee <mgushee@...>
Date: 2002-09-13T02:34:33+09:00
Subject: General ?s about a couple of Ruby features

Hi, Folks--

I am preparing a presentation on Ruby for a local Linux Users' Group.
Describing the language is easy enough, but being fairly new to it,
there are certain things I can't really provide a good rationale for
based on personal experience--and I will almost certainly be asked to do
so, since many in the audience are experienced Perl and Python
programmers. So I'd like to hear what people think about the following:

 * The ability to modify existing class and module definitions is
   obviously interesting, but what is it *useful* for? I can see
   that this feature allows you to change the behavior of all instances
   of a class; what, if any, other benefits are there? Does anyone have
   some real-world application scenarios where this feature is useful?

 * As above, for adding instance-specific methods.

 * Regarding iterators: it is clearly often more elegant to use an
   iterator rather than a for or while loop. Does the existence of
   iterators provide any benefit to end users (e.g. performance)?

Thanks in advance for your ideas!

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/