Hi there,
How would you solve the issue below? I’m looking for an elegant
solution for this one. I usually bump into this when I create my own
types.
I have a class that extends Ruby’s standard type set with my own
type. This new type is something that is supposed to be able to
work together with the already existing, built-in classes as close as
possible. I mean it is a valid thing to for instance add a Fixnum
to it, multiply it by a Rational number (which isn’t zero, of course),
etc.
The class can do this, because it’s :+, :*, :/, :- methods are
aware of these types. So, if x is an instance of my class, x + 1 works
fine, just like x * 2, and all the others.
The problem is that while I write programs, I always think about + as
a commutative operation, so I unconsciously expect that not only
x + 1, but the expression 1 + x gives the same result, which is of
course not true, because 1 + x calls Fixnum#+, and that method
does not know anything about my class.
How could I make at least Numeric classes behave this way? What
I want is that if a Numeric instance method receives an object as a
parameter that is an instance of my class, it should call the same
method on the argument with itself (I mean ‘self’) as the parameter
in case of commutative operatins, like + and *. The problem is a
bit more difficult in case of order-dependant operators, like / and -…