On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:16:34 +0900, Austin Ziegler <halostatue / gmail.com> wrote:
> Frankly, adding static typing or even type hinting to Ruby will
> *reduce* Ruby's flexibility.
One of the areas where hinting (if I understand what you mean
correctly by it) can be useful is for interoperability with more
static platforms.

It does happen, ask those of us who use Ruby to provide WSDL/SOAP
services to other platforms :)

I could hint at method type and return value signatures, generating
decent WSDL would be a lot easier.

A .NET client of the Ruby service will die horribly more often than
not if there is a slight variation in the return message from Ruby as
to what it was expecting based on the WSDL, whereas Ruby is much more
accepting.

If you've seen WSDL syntax, you'll understand why I want to generate
it from the Ruby code instead of writing it manually and running
wsdl2ruby over it :)

Currently I have my own "hinting" using Module#included and per class
annotations.

class WebApi
  include Webservice

  wsdl_method :meth, :in => [String, Integer], :out => [String]
  def meth(param1, param2)
    ""
  end
end

This way works, but I'd prefer something closer to the method code.

Leon