From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2003-08-13T02:47:01+09:00
Subject: Re: common constructor idioms

Hi,

In message "common constructor idioms"
    on 03/08/13, Scott Thompson <easco@mac.com> writes:

|In C++ one often declares a constructor that accepts another instance 
|of this class.  For those familiar with C++ syntax I'm talking about:
|
|class MyClass {
|	/* other interesting stuff in this class deleted */
|
|	/* Copy constructor */
|	MyClass(const MyClass &objectToCopy);
|};
|
|I guess you could do something similar in Ruby like this:
|
|class MyClass
|	def initialize(x)
|		if x.class == MyClass then
|			#some code to duplicate stuff in x
|		else
|			#potentially other initialization mechanisms here
|		end
|	end
|end

How about leaving "initialize" for basic initialization, and define
class methods for each object construction scheme, with proper names?

							matz.