From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2004-04-26T06:44:30+09:00
Subject: Re: How do you know it quacks like a duck? is there a list of special methods?

Quoteing djd15@po.cwru.edu, on Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 05:22:23AM +0900:
> All the methods I can think of in the standard library that do different
> things based on what they're passed, though, actually check the class of
> the object (I think).

I was reminded by this in a recent post, which said the ruby stdlib had
been changed to use the presence of :read as a method to indicate an
object is IO-like.  In that case, the categories I'm aware of are:

# Class     respond_to?
  String     :to_str
  Array      :to_ary
  IO         :read
  Symbol     :id2name (or is this silly? are only Symbols symbol-like?)

Are there other "signature" methods?

Would be useful on the wiki page, maybe under ruby-idioms?

Cheers,
Sam