Fully dynamic d by opDotExp overloading

[Yigal Chripun]

On 17/04/2009 21:34, bearophile wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky:
>>> There are people who swear by the ability of adding methods at
>>> runtime and changing the inheritance hierarchy dynamically. It
>>> makes for a very fluid environment.
>> Personally, I've always seen that as extremely sloppy and
>> haphazard.
>
> Adding methods at runtime is named "monkey patching", and it is
> considered a bad practice even in Python. In Ruby it is more common.
> Usually in such languages such things are less dangerous because the
> code contains lot of tests anyway. Some people say that a way to
> remove most of the downsides of monkey patching is to make it scoped,
> that is the changes (like a method added or replaced) to a class
> aren't seen globally in the whole program (like from other modules),
> but only in the scope where such change is done (and its subscopes).
> I think I have not seen languages where this is doable yet.
>
> Bye, bearophile

just like anything in life this can be overused. This is a very useful 
tool in a programmer's toolbox for when you need, for example, to 
quickly experiment with something or do an urgent fix.

It's like when you build a house you have it properly designed and have 
solid foundations but after the house is built you can still redesign 
internally without rebuilding the entire house.