Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Duck Typing

I learnt how to program in Ruby, and as we all know it's a very flexible language. Recently I've been doing a lot of stuff in C# on windows, and a lot more stuff in Objective-C on the iPhone. Something finally clicked for me, when I was using these languages, and that was Duck Typing.

Ruby, unlike the C style languages, couldn't care less about what type of object it is dealing with. Now before you start, I will repeat, it couldn't care less about what type of object it is dealing with.

What Ruby cares about is if object responds to the method you're sending it. In Ruby there is even a respond_to? method to assert this. i.e.

1.respond_to?(:to_s) #=> true
1.respond_to?(:foo_bar) #=> false

So you can have two objects, of totally differing types, and instead of asserting type like you might in say C#, you can instead check that the object responds to a method. The great thing about this, is that if it doesn't and you want it to, you can use Ruby's meta programming to dynamically inject that method into that object. For instance

unless 1.respond_to?(:foo_bar)<br />   1.class.class_eval do<br />      def foo_bar<br />         self * 100<br />      end<br />   end<br />end

1.foo_bar #=> 100
2.foo_bar #=> 200
30.foo_bar #=> 30000

12.2.foo_bar
#=> NoMethodError: undefined method `foo_bar' for 12.2:Float

So we've used class_eval to dynamically inject the method foo_bar in the class of 1(Fixnum), and so now all instances of Fixnum will respond to that method. We've never even checked it's type, we don't care, all we know is that we want it to respond to the method foo_bar and now it does. Obviously our Float class doesn't have this method hence the reason that 12.2 has raised the undefined method error. Any guesses on how to make this work :D, yeah that's right, class_eval and respond_to? will do it, just like we did with Fixnum.

So in summary what is the point of Duck Typing? Why not just check the class, and respond with what we as coders know it can and cannot do(or think we know it can do)?

Well, seriously why do you care what class it is? When what you really wanted to know is, whether it's going to respond to a method? Sometimes class and type is important, and obviously those features are there and should be used when class is important, but sometimes you just need to stop and ask yourself.

Do I can about type or do I just want to know if I can execute a method on this object?


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