From: "T. Onoma" <transami@...>
Date: 2003-11-20T11:46:20+09:00
Subject: Re: "stereotyping" (was: Re: Strong Typing (Re: Managing metadata    about attribute types) )

Sean O'Dell wrote:

> Doing a respond_to? for every method you need an object to implement is 
> tedious, especially when developing a collection of related functions, and it 
> doesn't mean that the object does what it reports to do, nor that it takes 
> the parameters you expect.  For example, if an object responds_to?(:open), 
> what does it open?  A file by name?  The end of a socket?  Which?  However, 
> if an object implements the :socket interface, then I know it responds_to? 
> :open, :close:, :read, :write, :select, etc. and I know exactly what 
> parameters to pass.
> 
> These things are important.  It saves a lot of code and headaches when you can 
> just ask "does this object implement this interface?"  You might not find it 
> useful, but others definitely do.  This is one of the things I think Ruby 
> could do very well and still retain its flexibility.  Being able to query for 
> the signature of an interface, with some syntactic sugar to allow parameters 
> to require them (optionally) is very much, to me, The Ruby Way; fearless and 
> visionary.  This should make everyone happy; people don't lose their 
> flexibility and we get all the type checking anyone should need.
> 
> So, although YOU might not need this, I and others do.  I think this is also 
> one of those little things that would win people over to Ruby.  Having 
> absolutely no solid type checking is a big turn-off for a lot of people, and 
> it's what keeps them developing in C/C++, Java and so on.  If they're 
> contemplating learning a script language, this would definitely catch their 
> eye.

er...excuse me? but did you just not understand me? you want to create a whole new set syntatical stuructures to specify interfaces so we can do checks against those, in a purely dynamic language?  D.N.C.

the "Duck Tape" :) notion I presented earlier uses the idea of code refection, such that it would be possible to query methods, and by extention objects, for a duck_signiture. this would be automatic and thus dynamic, in comparison to the static appraoch you present here.

-t0