What is the purpose of the Kernel module? What would change if all the things currently defined on Kernel were defined on Object, and there were no such module as Kernel?
When I want to define a method that can be called on any object, should I define that on Kernel or on Object?
I'll start with a question: what would self be inside a typical Kernel method such as puts? The closest thing to a meaningful self inside puts would probably be the Ruby runtime itself. Similarly for other "methods that really want to be functions" like Array or fork. So you can look at Kernel as a dumping ground for methods that are, more or less, commands or messages to Ruby itself.
Kernel also has odd methods like sub and chop that are really only useful for one-off ruby -e scripts. These things tend to use $_ as an implied self but I think they can be considered as special cases of the "commands to the Ruby runtime" as above.
Where does a method go when you want to be able to call that method on any object? I'd say that it would go into Object. If the method is really a function in disguise and has no meaningful self, then it would go into Kernel.
Related
Although I agree that extending native types and objects is a bad practice, inheriting from them should not be.
In a supposedly supporting gem (that I could not find), the way that the native types were to be used would be as follows:
require 'cool-unkown-light-gem'
class MyTypedArray < CoolArray # would love to directly < Array
def initialize(*args)
super(*args)
# some inits for DataArray
#caches_init = false
end
def name?(name)
init_caches unless !#caches_init
!!#cache_by_name[name]
end
def element(name)
init_caches unless !#caches_init
#cache_by_name[name]
end
private
# overrides the CoolArray method:
# CoolArray methods that modify self will call this method
def on_change
#caches_init = false
super
end
def init_caches
return #cache_by_name if #caches_init
#caches_init = true
#cache_by_name = self.map do |elem|
[elem.unique_name, elem]
end.to_h
end
end
Any method of the parent class not overridden by the child class that modifies self would call, let's say (in this case), the on_change function. Which would allow to do not have to re-define every single one of those methods to avoid losing track on changes.
Let's say the MyTypedArray would array Foo objects:
class Foo
attr_reader :unique_name
def initialize(name)
#unique_name = name
end
end
a short example of the expected behaviour of its usage:
my_array = MyTypedArray.new
my_array.push( Foo.new("bar") ).push( Foo.new("baz") )
my_array.element("bar").unique_name
# => "bar"
my_array.shift # a method that removes the first element from self
my_array.element("bar").unique_name
# => undefined method `unique_name' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
my_array.name?("bar")
# => false
I understand that we should search for immutable classes, yet those native types support changes on the same object and we want a proper way to do an inheritance that is as brief and easy as possible.
Any thoughts, approaches, or recommendations are more than welcome, of course. I do not think I am the only one that have thought on this.
The reason why I am searching for a maintained gem is because different ruby versions may offer different supported methods or options for native types / classes.
[Edit]
The aim of the above is to figure out a pattern that works. I could just follow the rules and suggestions of other posts, yet would not get things work the way I am intended and when I see it proper (a coding language is made by and for humans, and not humans made for coding languages). I know everyone is proud of their achievements in learning, developing and making things shaped in a pattern that is well known in the community.
The target of the above is because all the methods of Array are more than welcome. I do not care if in the version 20 of Ruby they remove some methods of Array. By then my application will be obsolete or someone will achieve the same result in far less code.
Why Array?
Because the order matters.
Why an internal Hash?
Because for the usage I want to make of it, in overall, the cost of building the hash compensates the optimization it offers.
Why not just include Enumerable?
Because we just reduce the number of methods that change the object, but we do not actually have a pattern that allows to change #caches_init to false, so the Hash is rebuilt on next usage (so same problem as with Array)
Why not just whitelist and include target Array methods?
Because that does not get me where I want to be. What if I want anyone to still use pop, or shift but I do not want to redefine them, or even having to bother to manage my mixins and constantly having to use responds_to?? (perhaps that exercise is good to improve your skills in coding and read code from other people, but that is not what it should be)
Where I want to be?
I want to be in a position that I can re-use / inherit any, I repeat, any class (no matter if it is native or not). That is basic for an OOP language. And if we are not talking about an OOP language (but just some sugar at the top of it to make it appear as OOP), then let's keep ourselves open to analyse patterns that should work well (no matter if they are odd - for me is more odd that there are no intermediate levels; which is symptom of many conventional patterns, which in turn is symptom of poor support for certain features that are more widely required than what is accepted).
Why should a gem offer the above?
Well, let's humble it. The above is a very simple case (and even though not covered). You may gain in flexibility at some point by using what some people want to call the Ruby way. But at a cost when you move to bigger architectures. What if I want to create intermediate classes to inherit from? Enriched native classes that boost simple code, yet keeping it aligned with the language. It is easier to say this is not the Ruby way than trying to make the language closer to something that escalates well from the bottom.
I am not surprised that Rails and Ruby are almost "indistinctly" used by many. Because at some point, without some Rails support, what you have with Ruby is a lot of trouble. As, consequently, I am not surprised that Rails is so maintained.
Why should I redefine a pop, or a last, or first methods? For what? They are already implemented.
Why should I whitelist methods and create mixins? is that a object or method oriented programming?
Anyway... I do not expect anyone to share my view on this. I do see other patterns, and I will keep allowing my mind to find them. If anyone is open enough, please, feel free to share. Someone may criticize the approach and be right, but if you got there is because it worked.
To answer your question as it is written, no, there is no gem for this. This is not a possibility of the language, either in pure Ruby or in C which is used internally.
There is no mechanism in detect when self is changed, nor any way to detect if a method is pure (does not change self) or impure (does change self). It seems you want a way to "automatically" be able to know when a method is one or the other, and that, to put simply, is just not possible, nor is it in any language that I am aware of.
Internally (using your example) an Array is backed by a RArray structure in C. A struct is simple storage space: a way to look at an arbitrary block of memory. C does not care how you choose to look at memory, I could just as easily cast the pointer of this struct and say it is a now a pointer to an array of integers and change it that way, it will happily manipulate the memory as I tell it to, and there is nothing that can detect that I did so. Now add in the fact that anyone, any script, or any gem can do this and you have no control over it, and it just shows that this solution is fundamentally and objectively flawed.
This is why most (all?) languages that need to be notified when an object is changed use an observer pattern. You create a function that "notifies" when something changes, and you invoke that function manually when needed. If someone decides to subclass your class, they need only continue the pattern to raise that function if it changes the object state.
There is no such thing as an automatic way of doing this. As already explained, this is an "opt-in" or "whitelist" solution. If you want to subclass an existing object instead of using your own from scratch, then you need to modify its behavior accordingly.
That said, adding the functionality is not as daunting as you may think if you use some clever aliasing and meta-programming with module_eval, class_eval or the like.
# This is 100% untested and not even checked for syntax, just rough idea
def on_changed
# Do whatever you need here when object is changed
end
# Unpure methods like []=, <<, push, map!, etc, etc
unpure_methods.each do |name|
class_eval <<-EOS
alias #{name}_orig #{name}
def #{name}(*args, &block)
#{name}_orig(*args, &block)
on_changed
end
EOS
end
I am submitting solutions to Ruby puzzles on codewars.com and experimenting with how locked into the testing enviroment I am for one of the challenges.
I can redefine the classes used to test my solution but they are defined by the system after I submit my code. If I freeze these objects, the system cannot write over them but a RunTime error is raised when it tries to.
I'm fairly new to Ruby, so I'm not sure which parts (other than falsiness and truthiness) are impossible to override. Can I use Ruby code to force modification of frozen objects to silently fail instead of terminate the program or is that bound up in untouchable things like the assignment operator or similar?
The real answer here is that if you might want to modify an object later, you shouldn't freeze it. That's inherent in the whole concept of "freezing" an object. But since you asked, note that you can test whether an object is frozen with:
obj.frozen?
So if those pesky RuntimeErrors are getting you down, one solution is to use a guard clause like:
obj.do_something! if !obj.frozen?
If you want to make the guard clauses implicit, you can redefine the "problem" methods using a monkey patch:
class Array
# there are a couple other ways to do this
# read up on Ruby metaprogramming if you want to know
alias :__pop__ :pop
def pop
frozen? ? nil : __pop__
end
end
If you want your code to work seamlessly with any and all Ruby libraries/gems, adding behavior to built-in methods like this is probably a bad idea. In this case, I doubt it will cause any problems, but whenever you choose to start hacking on Ruby's core classes, you have to be ready for the possible consequences.
I'm currently creating a my own plugin for Redmine. I found the following method in its core (not exact code, but the idea is preserved):
def method(foo, bar, array)
# Do some complex stuff with foo and bar
#array = array
#array.uniq!
#array = #array[0:3]
# Do some complex weird stuff with #array
end
I have to change this '3' to '6', because three elements in array is not enough for my plugin's purposes. I can change it manually and nothing crashes, but I don't want to patch Redmine's core. So, I'm writing a plugin which replaces this method with my own implementation, which does the same thing, but three is changed to six.
Here's the problem: if this file updates, outdated method will be used. Is there any way to check what's written inside method in runtime (for example, when server starts)?
By the way, is there any method to directly modify this constant without overriding the whole method?
If you are able to access the file, then you can use the pry gem to check the source code. Or without such gem, you can manually check the location of the method by doing puts method(:foo).source_location, and read that part.
The easiest for you to change the behaviour is to override the entire method.
No, there is no way to get a method's source code at runtime in Ruby. On some Ruby implementations there may be a way to get the source code which works some of the time, but that will be neither reliable nor portable. After all, there isn't even a guarantee that the source code will even be Ruby, since most implementations allow you to write methods in languages other than Ruby (e.g. C in YARV, Java in JRuby etc.)
This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Is Ruby pass by reference or by value?
Working with Ruby, when passing an object to a method, how is the memory of this object handled?
Coming from a C background, I can think of several things which may be happening:
A copy of the memory associated with the according object and is made available to the method being called. In which case the modification of the object would only be reflected in the context of method being called, and not the calling method.
A reference to the memory of the object is passed the method being called (essentially a pointer). Hence any changes made by the object by the method being called or the calling method would be reflected in both contexts. As well, should this program be multithreaded, some kind of mechanism (mutex, semaphore, etc.) must be used to ensure mutually exclusive access to that memory performing write operations.
Something else I am unable to think of... maybe a memory model similar to that of Go... Pipes... MessagePassing...?
What is actually happening?
Ruby uses pass-by-value, or more precisely, a special case of pass-by-value where the value being passed is always a pointer. This special case is also sometimes known as call-by-sharing, call-by-object-sharing or call-by-object.
It's the same convention that is used by more or less every object-oriented language ever created.
Note: on all existing Ruby implementations Symbols, Fixnums and Floats are actually passed directly by value and not with an intermediary pointer. However, since those three are immutable, there is no observable behavioral difference between pass-by-value and call-by-object-sharing in this case, so you can greatly simplify your mental model by simply treating everything as call-by-object-sharing. Just interpret these three special cases as internal compiler optimizations that you don't need to worry about.
Here's a simple example you can run to determine the argument passing convention of Ruby (or any other language, after you translate it):
def is_ruby_pass_by_value?(foo)
foo.replace('More precisely, it is call-by-object-sharing!')
foo = 'No, Ruby is pass-by-reference.'
return nil
end
bar = 'Yes, of course, Ruby *is* pass-by-value!'
is_ruby_pass_by_value?(bar)
p bar
# 'More precisely, it is call-by-object-sharing!'
In short: it's your option 2.
Ruby uses your second option, passes the parameter by reference.
I just discovered Ruby's metaprogramming (after 7 years of using Ruby, it was about time!) and I have this question:
Assuming I run a program that uses class_eval and other metaporgramming functions to add methods to a class, is there an easy way, when re-running the same program, to have these new methods already defined, or do I have to program my own system which, every time class_eval is used, also save the generated code in a file in order to re-evaluate it the next time I run the program?
Thanks
This is not how it's done. A proper way is, when you run the program next time, to run all those calls to define_method, class_eval (and whatnot) again and define methods in run-time.
Imagine what would happen if generated methods persisted in your source code? Would you like your attr_accessor to replace itself with two new methods?
What if you're writing such a meta-method yourself and you change it. How do you think all those saved generated methods will be updated?
I don't know where you read about metaprogramming, but I strongly recommend this book: Metaprogramming Ruby. It should clear your head. :)
You can not (with eval, and self-assembled strings you could, but that is not metaprogramming anymore) and should not do that, even ruby's standard library is re-evaluated on program launch.
Another possibility would be forking, unicorn is a good example for that. Evaluate all your method definitions, and then start spawning child processes, which are copies of the "master" process. This saves you the time of re-evaluating all your code, as forks are pretty fast compared to that.