From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-01-02T23:56:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Interfaces in Ruby

On Friday, January 3, 2003, 1:49:55 AM, Robert wrote:

> since ruby is dynamically type in principle there is no technical need for
> interfaces.  however, if i want to define an interface - say for reasons of
> documentation - what is the suggested way to do so?  create a class with a
> set of methods returning 'nil' or 'self'?  or create a method, that checks
> the interface of an instance and raises a TypeError if any of the methods is
> missing?  what would you suggest?

The latter is the approach I took on my most recent Ruby project.  I
was pretty happy with it.  These were abstract classes, not
interfaces (in Java parlance), but the point remains the same.

My exact code in the methods was:

    raise "This method needs to be overwritten"

Cheers,
Gavin