Method.new - why not?

Ruby
1

Hi,

Just a random thought that I think was inspired by several people on
the list asking about getting the name of the method from within the
method - why don’t we have Method.new? In other words, what if this:

def foo(x, y=1)
end

Was the equivalent of this?

x = Method.new(:name => ‘foo’, :parameters => [‘x’, ‘y’], :defaults =>
{‘y’ => 1})
Object.include(x) # or bind(x) or something

Similar to an UnboundMethod I suppose, but with more options. Wouldn’t
it be easier to get method metadata with this approach? And give
programmers the ability to associate any methods with any class or
module?

class Bar
def foo(x, y=1)
p method(:foo).metadata # => @name => ‘foo’, @parameters =>
[‘x’,‘y’], :defaults => {‘y’ => 1})
end
end

Or is this totally stupid?

If this has been discussed before just point me to the thread.

Regards,

Dan

2

Isn’t that how it already works?? :). Sorta. :). Try this:
File.method(:foreach)

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3

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 7:20 AM, Daniel B. [email protected]
wrote:

def foo(x, y=1)

Dan

Not stupid at all. I would even suggest that we do not bind methods to
object’s class anymore.
Class is just a convenient? place for method err forget that word,
behavior lookup after all.

a = def a *args, &blk; whatever end
shall yield exactly the same as
a = lambda{ |*args,&blk| whatever }

But than a could implement the whole API above.
In other words, either Proc or Method has to die, one is redundant!

object.define_method a
object.extend a

Now the language implementors will probably just kill me, but that is
a risk I have to take ;).

R.

4

There’s nothing to stop him writing a new class, say Message, that
exhibits this behaviour tho hey

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On 05/02/2009, at 2:29 AM, Yukihiro M. [email protected]

5

Hi,

In message “Re: Method.new - why not?”
on Wed, 4 Feb 2009 15:20:21 +0900, Daniel B.
[email protected] writes:

|Just a random thought that I think was inspired by several people on
|the list asking about getting the name of the method from within the
|method - why don’t we have Method.new? In other words, what if this:
|
|def foo(x, y=1)
|end
|
|Was the equivalent of this?
|
|x = Method.new(:name => ‘foo’, :parameters => [‘x’, ‘y’], :defaults =>
|{‘y’ => 1})
|Object.include(x) # or bind(x) or something

|Or is this totally stupid?

I don’t think the idea itself is stupid at all, but I am afraid that
it doesn’t go quite well with Ruby’s Lisp-2 semantics. That idea
would shine better in Lisp-1-ish languages like Scheme or Python.

          matz.