"Conrad Schneiker" <schneik / us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>Nathaniel Talbott wrote:
[long essay omittted]
>Given this situation, about the only practically effective way to argue
>for adding some additional form of static type checking to Ruby is to base
>such arguments on actual experience with Ruby programs. Only on the basis
>of such (and much!) *actual* *Ruby* *experience* would you then have a
>reasonable clue about what sorts of things were actually needed, why they
>were needed, and where they were needed. I strongly suspect that some
>optional Ruby Way (tm) of static type-checking will eventually be
>developed, but I doubt that C++ will be the language that Ruby will borrow
>from.

I have suggested before, and I still think, that it would
be very useful for Ruby to have a way to explicitly declare
private variables and have a lexically scoped pragma
that does not allow you to use anything not declared to
be a variable as a variable.  Likewise it would be
useful to keep track of what methods have been used in
a class, and it would be good to have a pragma which means,
"This class should now be self-contained, all functions in
it should resolve properly."

These two additions would be analogous to Perl's strict
pragma.  They are (as you can see) not very strict, but
between them you manage to catch most stupid typos.

Cheers,
Ben
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