Disclaimer: The length of this post in particular has nothing whatsoever to do
with how strong or well-informed I am about the topic. I actually didn't know
about coercion until today, so I may be missing something obvious. Proceed
with caution...
Well, to a point. I just reflexively change is_a? to kind_of? everywhere I see
it, unless there's a good reason not to. I don't have a problem with your
cases, just pointing out an alternative.
but that said, it can be done even better:
First, in TimeInterval, alias_method :to_int, :value
If this article is correct:
http://www.rubyfleebie.com/to_i-vs-to_int/
...then I'm not sure that's the case. Do we always want to represent a time
interval as an integer number of seconds? Maybe, but my instinct is that maybe
there are other integers we could get out of this object.
if other.respond_to? :to_int
TimeInterval.new(value + other.to_int)
elsif other.respond_to? :coerce
a, b = other.coerce(self)
a + b
else raise TypeError, "#{other.class} can't be coerced into TimeInterval"
end
While I agree that to_int is the correct way to check if something's an
integer, the original check was for anything numeric, so it might not be
sufficient (though it's probably fine for this class so far).
So maybe something like:
if other.respond_to?
to_int) || other.kind_of?(Numeric)
TimeInterval.new(value + other.to_int)
elsif other.respond_to? :coerce
begin
a, b = other.coerce(self)
a + b
rescue TypeError
if other.respond_to?
to_i)
self + other.to_i
else
raise
end
end
elsif other.respond_to?
to_i)
self + other.to_i
else
raise TypeError, "#{other.class} can't be coerced into TimeInterval"
end
That could probably be DRYed up a bit.
The idea is, if something has a to_int or is a Numeric of some sort, it's
claiming that it is _just_ a number, so we're probably free to treat it as
such. Otherwise, let it try to coerce first before we fall back to tricks like
to_i.
Why?
It's a contrived example to begin with, so my answer will be just as
contrived, but... Suppose I create, say, an HourInterval class, which
represents time intervals of hours. Then:
HourInterval.new(5)
You'd expect that to be five hours, right? Then you'd also expect:
HourInterval.new(5).to_i
...that should return 5. However, if we just let it to_i (or to_int, if it's
pretending to be just a number), then TimeInterval will treat it as five
_seconds_ instead of five hours, no matter what we do. That's why I'd suggest
giving it a chance to coerce first, and saving the fuzziest conversions for
when that fails.
Now the only trick is to make sure that we never call 'coerce' from inside a
'coerce' method, unless I'm missing something.
I'm told exception handling is expensive. I wonder if it might make sense to
have a non-raising form of 'coerce', or a can_coerce? method, to avoid that
overhead. But then, if you're doing this sort of thing and you start caring
about performance, you can always manually convert things ahead of time.
