Very preliminary announcement:


                    Ruby Behaviors

       http://www.superlink.net/~dblack/ruby/behaviors


Summary (of what I hope will happen):

 Ruby Behaviors are locally-scoped changes to the Ruby core
 language. They are managed through facilities provided by class
 Behavior.

 The goal of Ruby Behaviors is to make it very easy to make temporary
 changes to Ruby, without interfering with other code and without
 having to convince anyone else of the merits of the change.  This
 will, I hope, take the burden off the RCR process, and open up a way
 for people with similar tastes in Ruby syntax tweaking to share
 modifications to their programming environments.


Status:

 The Ruby Behaviors project stands somewhere between the idea stage
 and the pre-alpha stage.  I'm "announcing" it before a real working
 version of it exists, because I'm increasingly convinced that there's
 a real need for it and potential interest in it and I think it's the
 kind of project which will benefit from early exposure.


Comments:

 As per ruby-talk:14556, I have long been convinced that there's a
 huge leak in the Ruby code pipeline.  What's leaking out is the
 energy devoted to making small, working changes to Ruby's behavior.

 Many of us make such changes frequently.  But currently there is no
 cogent mechanism for collecting and sharing and selecting among these
 changes, should one want to do so.

 The only existing mechanisms that have any bearing on this are RCRs
 and RAA.  RCRs have their place, but they are not the solution to the
 problem I'm describing.  RAA is not scaled to work with the kinds of
 small changes I'm talking about.

 I am convinced that the way to fix the leak, and to start really
 taking advantage communally of the adaptability of Ruby at this
 level, is to create an easy mechanism for introducing locally-scoped
 language changes - and a systematic way of organizing and sharing
 those changes.

 It is not out of the question that I will change the name to
 RuBehaviors.  In fact, very little is out of the question at this
 point :-)  See the Web site for more.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack / candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav / shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav