This is something that has bothered me about my Ruby usage. A lot of the time, I feel like I'm writing "dynamic" code that really just needs to be pre-processed.
class Cool
[:ice, :soda, :snow].each do |item|
define_method item do
#some code
end
end
end
There isn't a real reason why that couldn't be pre-processed. I don't know a ton of Java, but the idea of compile-time code generation is appealing. Does anyone know more about this?
That code is only run once per application lifetime. Without risking DRY, I don't know what you mean by 'pre-processed'. Do you care if it is run at the parse time instead of the Class Object definition time?
Pre-processed here likely means what you think it means. DRY is not really a concept meant to be applied to method definitions (IMO), but rather method bodies-- of course there are many ways to abuse the interpretation of DRY as well. As far as whether you should care about compile vs load time-- in Ruby you don't need to, but if the language had static typing, it would make a difference.
