> On 11 Jun 2015, at 9:51 , PBKResearch <pe...@pbkresearch.co.uk> wrote: > > I don’t quite understand Norbert’s comment. Does ‘monkey’ apply to me or to > what I have done? Either way, it seems unnecessary and abusive.
It's a phrase to describe the change: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch> I think Ruby popularized it, the phrase I was familiar with in a Smalltalk context was "method override" > Thanks to Sven’s careful use of informative method names, the effect of my > change is quite clear. Any comma in the value part of a query line will be > encoded. Nothing else. I did my best to trace any side effects, and didn’t > find any. What is not ‘reliable’ about that? > > Peter Kenny The problem with overrides of methods in an external librarey arise when: - Other packages you load depend on the same method being monkey patched in a different way way. - Bug fixes/Refactorings in the base library renders the change incorrect/obsolete, which can be hard to notice. * Subclassing and adding your modifications there instead "solves" the first problem. Reading the specs, determining the original behaviour is a bug, submitting a fix, and have it accepted in the base library instead fixes both. Cheers, Henry * For instance, in my day job maintaining a VW application, when upgrading to new versions, verifying that all monkey patches are still correct accounts for a significant portion of the time spent
