Comments on Headius: Creating a Field-Initializing 'new' Method

Aman: yes, initializing the instance variables dir...

2007-08-20T13:21:07.394-05:00

Aman: yes, initializing the instance variables directly might be a better option. And the reason I puw new! in class is because only classes can be instantiated; putting new on all Objects wouldn't be appropriate, since you can't new an arbitrary object.

e.g.

a = "foo"
a.new! # doesn't make sense

Cool solution! I also learnt something new, ie, cl...

2007-08-20T12:53:12.216-05:00

Cool solution! I also learnt something new, ie, class MyClass...end is same as MyClass = Class.new {...}

One suggestion though... supposing we didn't want setters for some of our attributes (to be used internally only) -- in that case we'll not have "#{key}=", however, we may want the attribute initialized using the constructor (new!). For this, I'd use
new_obj.instance_eval "@#{key}=#{value}"
instead of
new_obj.send "#{key}=", value

Do you think that's okay?

Also, I wanted to ask something regarding the explanation about putting new! in Class. How is it different from putting it in Object?

Very clever, thank you for posting this.

2007-06-03T21:06:29.473-05:00

Very clever, thank you for posting this.

I think this solution, while cute, is too complex....

2007-06-01T23:58:19.767-05:00

I think this solution, while cute, is too complex.

eg:

class Person < Struct.new(:firstname, :lastname)

You can also just extend OpenStruct if you don't know what fields you will use ahead of time.

Sure, but I think this feature is really handy and...

2007-06-01T13:04:39.092-05:00

Sure, but I think this feature is really handy and perhaps a good number of developers like to have it in their projects, how many copies/versions of the code will exist? perhaps it won't make it into mainstream Ruby but I wonder if there is an extension project (like Java's jakarta-commons) where this feature may find a home.

Actually, I think my point was that Ruby doesn't n...

2007-06-01T09:33:52.789-05:00

Actually, I think my point was that Ruby doesn't need to have language-level features like this added because it's trivial to extend the language to support them. There's probably no chance of this getting into mainstream Ruby since anyone could load those 20-25 lines of code themselves and have the feature available. That's what I love about Ruby...it may not have feature X from some other language, but it's almost always trivial to add it using a tiny amount of code.

Hmmm nice to see Ruby taking hints from Groovy... ...

2007-06-01T06:45:37.740-05:00

Hmmm nice to see Ruby taking hints from Groovy... ;-)
This is surely helpful, what are the odds of this feature making into mainstream Ruby?