[ruby-talk:7154] Re: Ruby in the US

On Thu, 14 Dec 2000  00:10:02 +0900, Josh Stern wrote:
[snip]
> 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??).

I've written a proof-of-principle extension to class Module to do just
that. It enables you to use typed attributes and typed functions
(i.e., typed parameters and a typed return value).

The declaration syntax is obfuscated and needs some more thought:

class SomeClass
  # attribute declaration: tattr [:name, Type], ...

  # C analogue: String foo; SomeClass bar;
  tattr [:foo, String], [:bar, SomeClass]

  # function declaration: tdef [:name, ReturnType, [[:param, Type], ...]]

  # C analogue: String f1(void)
  tdef [:f1, String] do
    body
  end

  # C analogue: void f2(String a, Array b)
  tdef [:f2, nil, [[:a, String], [:b, Array]]] do
    body
  end
end

It throws descriptive TypeMismatch exceptions:

attribute mismatch:
  Type mismatch: attr Foo::name: expected String, got Fixnum
parameter and retval mismatch:
  Type mismatch: func Foo::f3 param txt: expected String, got Bar
  Type mismatch: func Foo::f4 retval: expected String, got NilClass

I'm fleshing out some details (syntax, maybe pre/postcondition
lambdas) and will announce it When It's Ready[tm]  ;)

	Michel