As I mentioned before, there is no real reason or goal behind developing Brat, I just saw potion and decided I wanted to be cool, too.

What that means is that features in Brat are sort of based on two things: 1) How easy is it to implement in Neko and 2) Is it something I expect to have because I am spoiled by Ruby.

For example, closures/functions in Brat started off being identical to Neko’s, because obviously that was the easiest thing to do. And I hadn’t planned on taking the ‘prototyping’ approach, but it was easy and is likely the brattiest way to go.

Anyhow, when I was doing stuff for array objects, I was thinking I should really copy Ruby’s approach, which is to have an enumerable module and then mix it in to array and hash and so on. But, of course, that would mean implementing mixins somehow. I knew I didn’t want to add in any new things (like modules) and it’s all about the lowest resistance, so I created squish-ins.

I have no idea if this concept has been used before (probably), but essentially you can take an object and copy all the methods of another object into it.

a = new
b = new
a.something = { p "do something" }
b.squish a
b.something  #prints "do something" 

Note that I said it “copies” the methods from the other object. This is and isn’t true. Squishing in another object’s methods does not create copies of them, only references. However, it is a reference to the object’s actual methods at the time of the squishing. In other words, this is a copying action rather than an inheritance or subclassing action. If the squished-in object’s methods change, the…squisher(?) will still reference the old methods.

a = new
b = new
a.something = { p "do something" }
b.squish a
b.something
a.something = { p "now do something else" }
b.something   #still prints "do something" 

So we get the code-sharing of mixins but not the inheritance properties. For now, I’m fine with that. Of course, it is actually not that difficult to do both:

a = new
b = new
a.something = { p "do something" }
b.something = { a.something }
a.something = { p "now do something else" }
b.something   #prints "now do something else" 

I am not sure which is preferable.