From: Chad Fowler <chad@...>
Date: 2003-09-09T21:11:27+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: MetaTags 1.0

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Dave Thomas wrote:

# 
# A suggestion for a convention: rather than go down the strange 
# punctuation route (%Y{...} etc), could we just not adopt the convention 
# that, where sensible, each class that can construct instances from a 
# string should define a top-level method with the same name as the class.
# 

This looks like a very sensible approach.  An interesting challenge now:  
is it possible to create a new coding convention for a community simply by 
suggesting it? :)

# So, if I wrote a class called Caml, I'd also define a top-level method, 
# also called Caml, something like:
# 
#     class Caml
#       def Caml.from_string(str)
#         # .. check string format ..
#         self.new(str)   # or something similar
#       end
#     end
# 
#     def Caml(str)
#       Caml.from_string(str)
#     end
#