On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Tony Arcieri <tony@[...].com>  wrote:
>  On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@[...].com>wrote:
> 
> > As Matz himself has pointed out in this thread,
> >
> > >
> > > There's no way to modify local variables by sending message in Ruby.
> > >
> > >                                                         mat
z.
> >
> > Which is something I've said on this thread before (multiple times IIRC).
> >
> > This has nothing to do with whether or not the object bound to a
> > variable is immutable, it has to do with how ruby variable bindings
> > can and cannot be changed, and that is the whole point.
> >
> 
>  You still seem to be missing what I'm proposing.
> 
>  For Numerics, ++ would rebind.  For everything else, it would be dispatched
>  as a message.
> 
>  Am I being unclear?

No, but you ARE missing the fact that the lack of being able to rebind
a variable via a method has NOTHING to do with the class of the object
which is currently bound to that variable.

Since ruby variables aren't typed then the expansion of the syntactic sugar

  b = a++

to "rebind for Numerics and dispatch for everything else" would have
to be something like

  if  Number === a
     b, a = a, a.succ
  else
    #....
  end

But note that in order to add 1 to a number, we still need to dispatch
a method whether that be succ, or +  and if we are going to do that we
might just as well expand b = a++  to

   b, a = a, a.succ

no matter what a is currently bound to.

Not that I think ++ is valuable enough to change the language.
-- 
Rick DeNatale

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