From: Richard Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2003-02-12T06:45:15+09:00
Subject: Re: inheriting from base classes


On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at 04:15  PM, 
dblack@candle.superlink.net wrote:

>
>> The point I'm trying to make is that the ultra-dynamic features of
>> Ruby are generally used in libraries, frameworks, etc., behind the
>> scenes.  When John Q Programmer sits down to nut out an application,
>> he is 99% likely to take a similar approach in Ruby as he would in
>> Java, except that he notes he is free to do many things should the
>> need arise.  That is: identify some classes, perhaps a hierachy,
>> imagine the relationships between them, and bang out some
>> (conservative) code.  Test and repeat until it works.
>
> But we *are* behind the scenes here.  At least, that's the interesting
> part to me :-)  You're probably right statistically -- I'm just
> intrigued by other possibilities, and curious about their viability.

I don't know.  I am nut'in out a production Ruby application, and I 
just did this yesterday (simplified and names changed to protect 
innocent):

class Foo
   def override_me
   end
end

myFoo = Foo.new
def myFoo.override_me
   #do something cool
end

Now, i could have created a subclass and instantiated it (which is what 
I did do, but not explicitly.)

class MyFoo
   def override_me
     #do something cool
   end
end

myFoo = MyFoo.new

This would be a very Java thing to do...but adding the method to the 
object instance just felt (and worked) right.  Java has no such 
capability.  Having written literally hundreds of thousands of lines of 
production Java code (and a fair bit o' Ruby production code)  I 
approach the two very differently and the way I use classes, modules 
and objects is the main difference.

-rich