On 11 Aug, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> 
> In message "[ruby-talk:00613] Re: Bug in Array#clone!"
>     on 99/08/11, GOTO Kentaro <gotoken / math.sci.hokudai.ac.jp> writes:
> 

[...]
 
> What information should be copied by dup?  Any opinion?

Sorry, no opinion! But as `clone' and `dup' are grouped together in the
manual like:

      clone 
      dup 

            Returns the copy of the object. For cloned object, ...

I have silently assumed, that they are synonymous. A proposal:

	Whenever methods do the same work with little difference you
	could group them, and differ them in the description. For
	example:

	getc
	readchar

	    Returns a character read from the receiver. In case of EOF,
	    getc returns nil, and readchar will raise an EOFError.

  	Or so...

	But functions that do different things like `dup' and `clone',
	it would be better, IMHO, to separate them in the description
	and point to each other to show the difference.

Ruby has some alias names like `IO#each' and `IO#each_line'. They are
described together like `clone' and `dup'. So it is not too difficult
to get the impressions, that all names described in that fashion are,
more or less, equal.

What do you think?

> 
>                                                 matz.

\cle