Feature #12141: send and __send__

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -

[hermes128 (Sebastian Herm)]

Hi guys !

We have this concept of sending messages to objects with Object#send, and that's fine, but often a child class defines its own send method, so that's why we have this ugly Object#__send__ hack.

So, I suggest dropping Object#__send__ and aliasing Object#send to Object#invoke instead, which seems to me as a better evocative method name.

Good or bad idea ?

Thanks !

[hermes128 (Sebastian Herm)]

[deleted by author]

[hermes128 (Sebastian Herm)]

Sorry, hard time editing/formating my post !

:-(

But I hope you understand what I mean !

[shevegen (Robert A. Heiler)]

I think this could only be done in ruby 3.x

But I believe that .send will remain because it is super short. :)

In the later ruby days, people added .public_send but .send is still so
much shorter to use and write; .invoke would also be longer to type. :D

The statement that classes often define their own .send is not true though.

I think for 5000 ruby classes that I may have written so far in 12 years
or so, I could not recall any more instance than one or two at max where
I would need a custom .send nor __send__ - it seems very specialized
and thus I don't think this warrants a change of the name .send() - but
that is of course just my own personal opinion here.

[shevegen (Robert A. Heiler)]

Hmm the second send that appears in bold is a __send__ - it seems
as if rubymine interpretes this as bold, sorry.

[hermes128 (Sebastian Herm)]

Thanks for your feedback. :-)

I agree, it's a minor (cosmetic) issue. For example, Rails uses __send__ only 17 times in its huge codebase. :-)

I don't suggest removing send, but just replacing __send__ with invoke to have a better named alias (yes, maybe for Ruby 3.0 ?)

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

• Description updated (diff)

[mame (Yusuke Endoh)]

I can't understand this issue. You know there is __send__ because send is often overridden. Then, why do you think invoke is okay? We can easily find a lot of cases that invoke is defined.

https://github.com/ruby/rake/blob/78d81799ad0b440478f6a99ff9af36ea131bda90/lib/rake/task.rb#L171
https://github.com/search?l=ruby&q=%22def+invoke%22&ref=searchresults&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93

--
Yusuke Endoh [e-mail]

[duerst (Martin Dürst)]

I agree with Yusuke. The name __send__ is chosen explicitly to show that this is an 'internal' method with special status.

[jwmittag (Jörg W Mittag)]

Martin Dürst wrote:

I agree with Yusuke. The name __send__ is chosen explicitly to show that this is an 'internal' method with special status.

Also, the messaging metaphor is at the core of Smalltalk-style OOP. And the very heart of this metaphor is precisely that you do not "call" or "invoke" methods, but rather send messages to objects which then may or may not invoke a method for you in response to that message, and that method may or may not have the same name as the message. Or, they may forward the message to somewhere else. Or, they may ignore the message.