Talk:Respond to an unknown method call

Donal, nice task. --glennj 13:59, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

What to do with the languages where this contract violation is always detected at compile time per language design? The task requires to show a way to circumvent the contract that explicitly states that the object x does not support the method f. In a strongly typed language this is impossible to do, which is basically the whole idea of design by contract. Should such languages be mentioned as having no solution? --Dmitry-kazakov 18:56, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

That means they are statically defined without means for dynamic type resolution, so omit. --Paddy3118 19:45, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Java was omitted for that reason. That seems like a good solution. --Mwn3d 19:45, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Note that Java has the opposite operation — the ability to dispatch to an existing method that you don't know at compile time — through its reflection classes, and it's actually very useful for me as I tend to write dynamic code in any language. I need to check whether there's a task to allow people to write about their language's ability to introspect its objects/classes to discover what methods are available and dispatch to them, but that's not this task; this task is about those languages which allow objects to accept any message if they wish (some like this, some don't; it's a philosophical thing). —Donal Fellows 09:01, 9 July 2009 (UTC)