From: dblack@...
Date: 2003-01-18T22:16:11+09:00
Subject: Re: quick: it responds, it evaluates, and is not empty

Hi --

On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

> Something within me rejects the notion that code should be designed to
> call random methods and handle the case where they don't exist. But
> I've been surprised many times by the clever and unique things that
> people make Ruby do, and I'm eager to be surprised again.

Well, "random" is a bit extreme... :-)  My main focus in all of this
is to explore ways of making it easier and faster to do something
which I think is very natural for Ruby, namely to handle situations
based on the capabilities and responses of the objects present at
a given point.

In particular, I think part of the difficulty in trying to convince
people not to rely on explicit type-checking in Ruby is that there's
no really compelling, precise alternative.  The double-barreled
"respond_to?"/method-call is, well, double-barreled, and the exception
wrapper is slow and inexact.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav