From: john_b_andrews@... (John Andrews)
Date: 2004-02-16T14:59:55+09:00
Subject: Making Ruby Stricter

To sell a Perl->Ruby transition in my company, I'd like to make
Ruby at least as strict as Perl.  Our opinion is that Perl is 
too loose and anything in Ruby that is looser than Perl will be
a strike against Ruby in some users' eyes. As an example, here 
are three things I'd like to change:
 
(A) I want "to_i" to raise an exception if the conversion fails.
 
(B) I'd like most NilClass methods modified so that doing anything
    except testing nil values for truth will raise exceptions.
    For example, NilClass#to_i should raise an exception.
 
(C) I'd like to eliminate all the "synonym" methods from our
    version of the language (this has nothing to do with being
    stricter than Perl).
 
Here is code for (A):
 
    class String
        alias new_to_i to_i
        def to_i
            Kernel::Integer(self)
        end
    end
     
The implementation I have in mind is to add all of my code to a
module and then ask our users to include the "strict" module.
 
Here are my questions:
 
1) Has anyone else done something like this?
 
2) Doing changes like this will likely break existing methods in
   Ruby classes and libraries that call the methods I've
   modified, right?  Is there a way around this?
 
3) Is there an implementation that avoids asking people to
   include this "strict" module?
 
Thanks much,
 
JA