From: Chad Fowler <chad@...>
Date: 2003-11-20T06:01:54+09:00
Subject: Re: "stereotyping" (was: Re: Strong Typing (Re: Managing metadata about attribute types)

On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Sean O'Dell wrote:

# On Wednesday 19 November 2003 11:46 am, Chad Fowler wrote:
# > On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Sean O'Dell wrote:
# >
# > # I'm clear on the subject of dynamic typing, and I'm not an advocate for
# > static # typing.  Being a strong advocate for one or the other is foolish,
# > in my # opinion.  Both are useful, and both can be employed here, so I BEG
# > you to # please employ SOME form of built-in interface checking.  Having
# > absolutely NO # mechanism leaves people who need to check for certain
# > methods and parameters # hanging in the wind.
# > #
# >
# > If you really need something that bad, how about respond_to?  If you need
# > something more robust, then there's types.rb by Eivind Eklund.
# 
# Because something of this nature should be built-in. 

...in your minoority opinion.

# It's faster when written 
# in C and doesn't have to be dynamically loaded via "require."  I also don't 
# believe type checking is something that there should be competing libraries 
# for. 

Why not?  By the way, I think types.rb is the only library that actually 
*does* type checking in the accurate ruby sense.

# Also, respond_to? doesn't say anything about what a method does or what 
# parameters it takes.  Checking for an implemented interface declares all of 
# that.

As demonstrated previously in this thread, class and/or module inheritance 
checking *doesn't* give you any info about what a method does or what 
parameters it takes.