What's better about Ruby than Python?

[Alexander Schmolck]

Gonçalo Rodrigues <op73418 at mail.telepac.pt> writes:

> On 18 Aug 2003 23:40:58 +0100, Alexander Schmolck <a.schmolck at gmx.net>
> wrote:

> >But of course what currently happens is:
> >
> >'just a method'
> >
> 
> And rightly so,  you have just rebinded a name. If you type
> 
> x.__class__
> 
> you get the older X. Or are you proposing that rebinding X to
> automagically rebind the __class__ of all the X instances?

Well, yes, I propose that x.__class__ return the *new* definition of X (like
in ruby, for example). I don't think that necessarily involves rebinding
anything "automagical", depending on how the lookup of x.__class__ works.

Can you give my any reason why you would *not* want all instances to be
updated on class redefinition?


> 
> But why can't you just
> 
> X.amethod = lambda self: "ah, now THIS is better!"
> 
> that is, mutate the class referenced by X instead of rebinding X to
> some other class?

Um, didn't you read what I wrote or was I just unclear?

To recap: usually, if I change a class I'd like all pre-existing instances to
become updated (Let's say you develop your program with a running python
session; you notice a mistake in a method-definition but don't want to start
over from scratch; you just want to update the class definition and have this
update percolate to all the currently existing instances. This is an *very*
reasonable wish if it doesn't just take seconds to get to the current state by
rerunning everything, but possibly hours or days). AFAIK doing this in a
general and painfree fashion is pretty much impossible in python (you have to
first track down all instances -- not an easy task, as far as I can see and
then updating their .__class__ might not quite work as expected either as I've
already mentioned).

I think this sucks big time, because it greatly devalues the interactive
programming experience for certain tasks, IMHO, but maybe I'm just missing
something since typically nobody complains.

'as