Duck typing is a problem when it's done by message name and those names aren't distinguished by namespaces. We're already starting to hear horror stories of Ruby libraries that want the same name to mean different things, especially with monkey-patching.
Heh, I've never run into or even thought of this - it seems like a very rare and very hard problem to solve. It's almost a semantic problem of language and meanings as opposed to a technical one -- I guess the solution would be to find some technical means of adding specificity...
hmm, if you have two objects which both support the method 'run', one of which is a jogger that will move into a 'running' state, and the other is a program which will actually begin executing code, and you have them both in say, an array that gets iterated over and every object is sent a 'run' message.. and they both take one argument and return nothing distinctive, well, that's extremely contrived. But such things happen. Scary.
Monkey patching has nothing to do with duck typing. Monkey patching is both incredibly powerful and exceedingly dangerous at the same time but, there is nothing about monkey patching that says you need duck typing. You do static typing AND have open classes. To pretend that problems related to open classes is somehow connected to duck typing is simply false.
I wouldn't say that it has _nothing_ to do with monkey patching. Monkey patching is the ability to update classes members dynamically. Duck typing is the ability to update an object's members dynamically. Since the overall point is to dynamically create a new member of some object, I think the previous poster can be forgiven.
Duck typing isn't the ability to update an object's members dynamically. There is nothing inherent in the meaning of duck typing that says anything about updating. All it says if i ask:
walk and talk of it and can walk and talk then as far as i'm concerned, its a duck because that is what a duck was expected to do.
> walk and talk of it and can walk and talk then as far as i'm concerned, its a duck because that is what a duck was expected to do.
This doesn't even parse.
Duck-typing is the idea that an object's type at a particular time is made up of the set of fields and methods it has _at that time_. I suppose that doesn't strictly require updating, but it would be a pretty lame duck with it.
Polymorphism w/o inheritance is a fine description. How do you think that can be accomplished without dynamic updating?
