On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 7:57 PM, James Britt <james.britt / gmail.com> wrote:
> David A. Black wrote:

>  I'm with David.
>

I understand David's POV as well as Philip's, I would have said MP as
did Philip, whome I want to thank for the explanation of my short
answer when I got cut off by some work.
That is why I asked David if MP was a well known term for nubies, it
does not seem to be so.

However James, David did specifically say that he did not judge the
technique by disliking its name. For what I am concerned I think MP or
Core Class Reopening is like most other techniques, when used with
care it is a marvelous thing.

OP's usecase was a good one IMHO very consistent with String in
general, I believe that we shall judge techniques by the semantic use
we are making of them.

class String
   def cap_all_words .... end
end

does seem much better than things like

class MyClass < String
   def capitalize; #do cap_all_words here; end
end

>  I can sort of understand the use of the term as the variant of Guerrilla
> Patching, but increasingly it gets used to mean almost any sort of run-time
> code alteration.  I.e. it's becoming more noise than signal.

What do you mean with code alteration here? I feel quite lost, seems
plain vanilla programming to me.
Maybe there are issues with reopening core classes ( can we call it
RCC ?) in libraries but for an application it often is the simplest
thing that works, and that is a big quality of code.

Just my 0.02c

Robert
-- 
http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/

---
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein