[ruby-talk:7152] Re: Ruby in the US

Dave Thomas  <[e-mail]> wrote:

>Unfortunately for Ben, Ruby also falls into the "truly horrible idea"
>category. Ruby variables are _not_ typed, but take on the type of
>whatever they happen to reference at the time. Similarly, the majority 
>of operators have no semantic meaning to Ruby, as they are simply
>method calls. This is the same as the Smalltalk and (in my limited
>understanding) the Javascript model.
>
>This lack of constraint is one of the defining features of the
>language.

I personally believe that some form of strong typing is invaluable
for large projects, but it makes quick development much slower,
so Ruby is potentially a great compliment to strongly typed
languages just for that reason.  But it would also be nice
to have flexible facilities for typing and 'design by contract'
that operate at run time in Ruby when in 'debug mode', and
have little or no overhead when in normal mode - some
run time device that is, say, comparable to the assert() macro
in C.  I just started thinking about Ruby two weeks ago, and just
got your excellent book last weekend, so I'm not qualified to
say what the best way is to implement that in Ruby (perhaps
a mixin for adding extra type info and argument signatures
to functions??).

-= Josh