From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2004-04-19T08:06:34+09:00
Subject: How do you know it quacks like a duck?

I have a method that encodes thing depending on what they are - Time,
DateTime, Date, String, etc.

If it's got a #to_str method, its stringy, that's easy.

And if it's got a to_ary method, its arrayie.

But how do I know it's Time-like? Time and DateTime are both time-like,
for example.

Should I see if it responds to everything I need by manually checking
for year/month/day/hour/min/sec?

Maybe I should just try, and catch method missing, and if I catch that,
try something else?

Or should I do the brute force call to #kind_of? so that it has to be
exactly the classes I know about?

How do other Ruby-ka handle this?

Thanks,
Sam