From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2001-01-09T23:46:47+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:8927] Re: No :<, :>, etc. methods for Array

Hello --

On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Ben Tilly wrote:

> You understand exactly.  Getting Perl's tie behaviour is
> not really a bonus.  It is good advertising which takes
> advantage of the fact that few Perl programmers actually
> understand anything about tie other than the fact that it
> looks like magic and is a cool feature.

Hmmm....  Why is that good advertising?  Well, we can agree
to disagree on that one :-)

> One note.  A good deal of Ruby's current library is
> designed after how Perl works.  For scripting I think that
> this is an excellent choice.  So even though it should be
> easy to imitate a built-in class, IMO the built-in classes
> should continue to have rich interfaces.

It's still unclear to me exactly when/why one would need
those modules to imitate a built-in class.  Especially if the
main role of the module is to sort of remind you that you
don't need to implement all the built-in's methods.  It seems
to me that the plasticity of Ruby already makes this easy
and clean.  Obviously one needs to decide which methods to
implement, but I don't see that as very obscure.

Anyway -- as you said a few postings ago, this isn't a big deal
to implement in Ruby (a point which I think some of the Perl
tie discussion has obscured a bit) -- so have at it!


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav