"William Djaja Tjokroaminata" wrote in
....
> I completely agree with Hal.  OO, no matter how wonderful it is and how
> much it has helped us, is not the solution or model of
> everything.  Mathematics, for whatever reason, has adopted the function

If my memory serves me right, the author of a introductory
set theory  book  (I went through a longer time ago then
I wish to remember;-) argued that a notation like
              ``(x)f''   or  (x)(f * g)
probably would have been a better fit with the standard left
to right Latin writing system - in other words by adopting
            ``5.cos''
Ruby would finally correct a historical mistake of epic
proportion;-)

> model and not the object model.  I personally prefer "abs(x)" to "x.abs"
> when I am dealing with math, but "5.times" is fine, as it is dealing with

Actually I don't really mind so much writing abs(x) or sin(x)
but I just cannot get over the ``Math'' prefixes Math.cos(x),
Math.sin(x) ....  they are reaaally tacky.

In the absence of Namespaces (which are a much better
solution then the proposed Numeric mixins)  things would
not be that bad if Math was at least a class (with disabled
new/allocate) - at least I could write

class MyMathNameSpace < Math; end

class << MyMathNameSpace
    def  sin_squared(x)
            sin(x) * sin(x)
    end
end


/Christoph