[ruby-talk:8334] Re: My first impression of Ruby. Lack of overloading? (long)

In article <[e-mail]>,
Dave Thomas  <[e-mail]> wrote:
>[e-mail] (Josh Stern) writes:
>
>> Yukihiro Matsumoto <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> >I'd add method overloading according their dynamic type of arguments,
>> >iff I can think of a specification which is affordable and consistent
>> >with rest of Ruby.  But I have little hope about this issue.
>> 
>> Well, just to throw something out there...perhaps there could be a
>> rule that methods with a special name, e.g.  ending with the '|'
>> character, are actually looked up based on hashing the method name
>> plus the argument type ids?
>
>It'd have to be a fairly clever hash, as you'd have to be able to deal 
>with subclasses.

Put another way: if one actually wanted it to have a behavior
similar to, say, Koenig lookup in C++, that would be quite
slow to do dynamically at run time, since the interpreter
would have to keep trying new hashes as it ascended the 
hierarchy.  But that expense would only apply to somebody
using it in that way, and there would be a pretty
obvious optimization to fix it (overload again for the dynamic
type you care about).

>Tell me again: what problem are we trying to solve here?

You mean why would somebody want to overload a method on arg 
types rather than manually do their own dispatch for
different arguments in one method (not very encapsulated)
or create different methods that abort if called with the 
wrong arguments?  It seems like the interpreter could help 
a bit with keeping things straight.  If it turned out
that it didn't hurt other things (big 'If') then it
seems like it would be a good feature.

-= Josh