From: Christoph Rippel <crippel@...>
Date: 2001-01-23T02:09:16+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:9724] Re: 101 Misconceptions About Dynamic Languages

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nosuzuki@e-mail.ne.jp [mailto:nosuzuki@e-mail.ne.jp]On Behalf Of
> Jean Michel
...
>  The functionality  you want  is to  describe a  mathematical structure,
> such as a  ring; the basic idea  is that, as soon  as certain operations
> and fields are defined, you can define certain other ones. A template in
Actually I did not want to define a field (not that this really matters ..)
> C++ expresses perfectly  this, but also a mixin in  Ruby. The only thing
> missing in Ruby here is the  ability to overload on argument types; this
> was  circumvented by  a hack  around 'coerce'.  Otherwise Ruby  is fully
> equivalent in expressiveness to C++.

I disagree with you. If I mixin I destroy the original nature of the Class - oh well
I can always mixin into a copy of my class. I also have to mixin the constants
(which is only thing I am really interested in anyway) as a separate Module (via
accessor_reader) and I have to remove the useless methods and I am probably stuck
with the OO equivalent of a tangling pointer - i.e. an illogical inheritance
hierarchy (well in this particular case ZZmod < Numeric I could probably live  with
it).

No thanks templates or generics are a much cleaner solution. My point was  not that
is impossible to generically program in ruby but it basically discouraged by the
current language design|sugar and I cannot truly escape the inheritance straight
jacket OO-languages typically impose on me. Ruby is nice language it just not
perfect either - I am fine with rubys untyped function but happen to dislike the IMO
lagging support for generic programming.


Christoph

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