From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2002-09-29T18:47:18+09:00
Subject: Re: thoughts on typelessness


----- Original Message -----
From: "ts" <decoux@moulon.inra.fr>


> >>>>> "d" == dblack  <dblack@candle.superlink.net> writes:
>
> d> I don't have any conclusive, ummm, conclusions to draw.  Just
> d> wondering what people think of all of this.  There was talk briefly of
> d> the idea of multi-dispatch and method signatures on respond_to?
> d> criteria, rather than type.  Maybe that's a way to bring that more
> d> accessibly and concisely into the syntax.  (Though I'm not sure
> d> exactly what that way would consist of, syntactially.)
>
>  Why do you think that I've added module in the signature (see
>  (ruby-talk:50139)) ?
>
>  an enumerable is just an object which respond to #each

This is questionable; depends what you mean.  An Enumerable also responds to
:grep, :sort, etc., according to 'ri'.

And "class X; def each end; end" responds to "each", but is not Enumerable.

And of course, you can "include Enumerable" without even implementing #each!

And you can take an Enumerable object (say, anArray) and undefine #each.

What becomes of your method signatures in all these cases?

[code, though interesting, snipped]

> Guy Decoux

Gavin