[ruby-talk:8810] Re: Modules and mixins

On  8 Jan, Ben Tilly wrote:
> Clemens Hintze <[e-mail]> wrote:

(...)

>>The three paradigms, Ruby supports and I want to mention, are:
>                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> It supports more of course. :-)

Of course. But because the original post was about modules, I have only
mentioned those paradigms that have anything to do with modules.

But it is nice from you that you have mentioned the functional paradigm
too. Especially as I am still not familiar with that paradigm yet. I
begin to learn it right now. Using Hope, Haskell and perhaps Ocaml :-))

(...)

> Ruby also supports functional techniques.  You call proc()
> to produce a procedure, and then call it many times.  The

I was not 100% sure that Ruby supports functional paradigm, though. From
what I have seen, the short time I learned functional programming now, I
got the impression that functional programming does not only mean to
have first class functions but also to write down function/formulas and
let the interpreter to chose the right one to be executed right now.
Like this:

  dec fib : num -> num;
  --- fib(n) <= fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);
  --- fib(1) <= 1;
  --- fib(2) <= 1;

If I understood this example right, all equations are equal. If I ask
the interpreter for fib(12), it should decide on its own what formula or
function equation it has to chose to solve my question.

But, OTOH, I may be totally false here. Perhaps you could enlight me,
what functional programming mean, and whether Ruby really supports that
paradigm well?

> following quick hack shows what those techniques look like,
> though it is a port of a quick example I did in Perl and I
> don't know if it is how you would want to solve this problem
> in Ruby:

(... really impressing 'hack' deleted ...)

Ehrm ... whoa! I would first have to look how your example is doing what
it does ... :-/

Impressing ... indeed! I will save it for further usage. And to answer
your question, I really do not know, how I would solve that problem
equally elegant as you've done right now! :-)

(...)

> Functional as well. :-)

It would be nice if that is true. 

(...)

> Cheers,
> Ben

Cheers too and thank you for the lesson, :-)
\cle