From: patrick-may@... (Patrick May)
Date: 2002-09-13T13:22:16+09:00
Subject: Re: not grasping the method overloading/multi-dispatch thing

Paul Brannan <pbrannan@atdesk.com> wrote in message news:<20020912181534.W25425@atdesk.com>...
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 05:40:53AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
> > In Ruby it's not really considered a downside... it seems to be an 
> > acceptable practice.
> 
> But should it be?  If I write a class, and someone modifies it, he had
> better have a darn good reason for modifying it.  If everyone goes
> around messing with the Integer and Float classes, how can we make any
> guarantees about the behavior of Integers and Floats?

Most changes to behavior are additions, not subtractions.  I consider
all of the below to be useful, but perhaps not common enough to be
part of the standard distribution:

# asserts
anArray.assert_includes( anotherArray )
integer.assert_valid_character

# formating
aString.to_headline
aString.to_title_widget

# comparisons
aString.diff( anotherString )

This is in addition to the sorts of methods on finds in java under
StringUtils.

~ Patrick