From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>
Date: 2002-10-03T05:03:26+09:00
Subject: Re: thoughts on typelessness

Exactly, Booker.  I grew up in Fortran and C/C++, and I think most of the
engineers are familiar with Fortran and C.  I think these days they teach
either Fortran, C, or Java in the engineering curriculum and not a single
functional language at all.  Although I am learning Ruby, I cannot expect
the users of my code (whom mostly will be engineers) to change their state
of mind.

I hope now you understand why I think the way I do.  I may change, but I
cannot expect the users of my code to change much.

As you see, Fortran, C, and Java are all procedural languages with static
typing, and only in C we have to deal with memory de-allocation.  That's
why I am really interested to use a language similar to Ruby with some
typing; if it is not for my sake, it is for my users' sake...

Regards,

Bill

P.S. By the way, I do have a Link class.  The "link" method is the
abstract factory pattern function to create a Link object.  For example,
to quickly create a network with 2 nodes you can simply write:

    lk = link (node, node)

Then if you want the link to be a T1 link, you can write

    lk.rate = 1.544e6    # link with 1.544 mbits/second data rate
===========================================================================
bbense+comp.lang.ruby.Oct.02.02@telemark.stanford.edu wrote:
>>def link (node0, node1, rate = 1e6, delay = 0.0, model = nil, attrs = nil,
>>type = Link::TYPE_FULL_DUPLEX, label = '', name = '', simStart = false,
>>simEnd = false, sim = nil)
>>    raise "..." unless rate.kind_of? Float
>>    raise "..." unless delay.kind_of? Float
>>    ....
>>end
>>

> - - Ah ha, at last some code. First of all there is a huge code
>   smell here. You are writing Fortran in Ruby. NO method/function
>   in any language that supports data structures should have more 
>   than 3 parameters. ( well maybe 4 in extreme cases.) Certainly,
>   in a Ruby method, more than 3 args is suspcicious. 

> - - Maybe you'd get a lot more out of Ruby if you spent some time
>   refactoring your code. I'd start out by making link an object
>   rather than a method. It's no wonder you want types in Ruby,
>   types would be a great addition to Fortran. 

> - - Booker C. Bense