From: Dan Doel <djd15@...>
Date: 2003-08-22T18:31:33+09:00
Subject: Re: What attracts me to Ruby

MikkelFJ wrote:

>>This is another thing that seems strange to me.  Ruby's object
>>orientation has never seemed intrusive to me.  You can write anything as
>>if it were a non-OO language, and things just live in the "main"
>>namespace.  I can't think of any ways in which Ruby's OO nature made it
>>more difficult to do something.  Can you think of a quick example?
>>    
>>
>
>You can't pass a reference to function around - not without involving less
>elegant Proc objects or similar.
>
>Also I really would like delegates in Ruby - passing a reference to a method
>such that it knows the class it belongs to.
>This is highly useful. I know it can be implemented (an old discussion), but
>it would be very nice to have in the core language.
>

It is:

class Foo
    def x
       @x
    end

    def x=(value)
       @x = value
    end
end

f1 = Foo.new
f2 = Foo.new

f1.x = 5
f2.x = 6

meth1 = f1.method(:x)
meth2 = f2.method(:x)

p meth1.call
p meth2.call  

It's not as transparent as in Python (calling Proc/Method objects don't 
use the same syntax as normal method calls)
but there's no reason you need that for anything other than syntactic 
consistency, and adding that would cause
more problems than it would solve.

- Dan