From: "Peña, Botp" <botp@...>
Date: 2004-01-24T19:47:20+09:00
Subject: Re: nuby: determine method passed and determine the receiver that	 rec eived the method

Dan Doel [mailto:djd15@po.cwru.edu] humbly replied/asked:

> >>ruby -w test1.rb
> >>    
> >>
> >"You ask for bark thru beethoven"
> >"arf!arf!"
> >"You ask for purr thru beethoven"
> >"sorry, cannot do purr thru beethoven"
> >  
> >
> I don't think you can do this.
> 
> Variable names are incidental, essentially they're just 
> pointers to the 
> underlying object.
> 
> You can have more than one variable pointing to the same 
> object, so any 
> object could
> have an infinite number of 'names' (theoretically).  Really, objects 
> don't have a name,
> variable names are just ways to help us remember which is which.

> Why do you want to do this?

Thank you for asking, sir Dan.

I am a newbie, and am trying to build a lesson plan for learning oop for
beginners like me and non-programmers -and my son fits the bill. I hope to
finish it before summer so that me and my son can learn together.

Reading Dave's PickAxe, I got to the portion of explaining to myself the
concept of receiver and method. Hoping that I'd simplify things to learn
first, I started off w a definition of a class without any methods defined
(in my example, class Dog). I would then instantiate an object of that kind
of class and bombard it with any methods I like.

However, I was stuck on "how does one know what methods were passed". I want
to do this so I can say (especially to my son), "See son, it (the dog) got
what you asked for. Next, we will now let it do what we asked..."... I
thought this was possible since there is a method_missing() method wc knows
the method passed (-unfortunately it is missing :-)..

I follow same reasoning of the receiver... (and of course I may be wrong).


> 
> - Dan
> 

kind regards -botp