From: Its Me <itsme213@...>
Date: 2004-02-27T04:54:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Extensible meta-data ?

"gabriele renzi" <surrender_it@remove.yahoo.it> wrote
> look on RAA for 'metatags'

Thanks, but this is very oriented towards documentation strings. I am
looking for something that operates at the meta-level, adding and removing
interlinked structures to classes, methods, ... This is roughly the change
from Javadoc tags to Java 1.5's metadata annotations (or, equivalently, to
C# metadata attributes).

My very preliminary thoughts are along these lines:
module Meta
    # meta allows adding and removing arbitrary properties
    def meta .... end
end

class Method # perhaps I need to use UnboundMethod?
  include Meta
end

class Parameter # I would like this but it seems impossible to hook into
  include Meta
end

class Attribute
  # one instance of this for each attribute
  # Ruby does not have such a class, so I would build my own versions of
attr: or attr_accessor:
  include Meta
end

class Class
  include Meta
end

And then use this:
class Mine; end meta ... # metadata on Mine

class Mine
   def foo; end meta ...  # metadata on Mine#foo
end

Thoughts? Am I trying to do something ridiculous?