On 3/16/07, Tom Pollard <tomp / earthlink.net> wrote:

> Yes, I had seen that when I googled 'multiton'.  As wikipedia
> articles go, it doesn't look particularly authoritative; in
> particular, it contains no references to places where the pattern has
> been defined or used.  Almost all of the other relevant hits I got
> were Ruby usages, which is a bad sign, because I'm sure this is a
> widely used pattern in many (most?) object-oriented languages.
>
> > And you are absolutely right. It is related to immutability --it is in
> > fact how one generally goes about creating immutable objects.
>
> It seems surprising, then, that such a commonly used pattern doesn't
> have an accepted name that you could have adopted.  Why not call it
> 'Immutable'?

I see. Well it's not your most common pattern, clearly. And I have
seen it called the Immutable pattern too. But for the module it
doesn't make as much sense b/c the Multiton is not the only way to
achieve Immutability. The Singleton Pattern an Immutable too. In fact
the Multiton pattern is sometimes just referred to as the Modified
Singleton pattern.

> (I like the idea of having a mixin available in the standard library
> to make this easy to use, I'm just not crazy about the name.)

Completely understand. Just think Multiton is probably more
technically correct name.

T.