From: Lyle Johnson <lyle@...>
Date: 2002-09-29T07:50:04+09:00
Subject: Re: alias versus method_missing

Joel VanderWerf wrote:

> It's a little less efficient, but this seems to be virtual:
> 
>   class Base
>     def bar; foo; end
>   end

Perhaps less efficient than an alias, but certainly more efficient than 
the convoluted method_missing approach I was considering. I like this 
because (as you've shown) I can still squeeze each "virtual alias" on to 
a single line.

> There must be a way to use Class#inherited to good effect, but the 
> following doesn't seem to work:

<snip>

Assuming we were able to make this kind of approach work, I wonder which 
one's more efficient in terms of storage. In other words, assume the 
extreme case that Base wants a *lot* of aliases for its methods. If you 
just define those "aliases" as differently-named instance methods (the 
approach described above) you've added N new instance methods total. On 
the other hand, if set up true aliases in each of Base's subclasses (via 
the Class#inherited trick) then it's N*M aliases (where M is the number 
of subclasses).