Raku vs Ruby Open Classes and Monkeys

Ruby is famous, among other interesting features, for its open classes. The idea is that you can inject behaviors** into existing classes without having to inherit, neither decorate, neither re-define them.

I’m not going to discuss if this features is useful or Object Oriented related, this is a discussion I’m not interested in. I think there are times when such capability is useful, and quite frankly my thesis project BlackCat and its successor [WhiteCat](https://github.com/fluca1978/WhiteCat){target="_blank"} both aimed at doing something really nasty that could had been a piece of cake with *open classes. I also believe that, under the hood, it is a very good idea to have open classes, and for example implementing a run-time environment can take a clear advantage of this concept. On the other hand, I don’t think open classes are for mere mortals and everyday usage.

However, open classes is still something really important to Ruby-ers, and is one of the motivations sometimes are told to me to explain the love for such language.

And Raku has open classes too!

Well, they are not called open classes, but you can mimic the very same Ruby behavior with [augment](https://docs.raku.org/syntax/augment){:target="_blank"}.

Let’s see first a Ruby example:



The above piece of code enhances the String class, that is an internal class of Ruby core, with the PostgreSQL method. This means, that the puts line does not print the message you are expecting, rather what the method PostgreSQL provides:



Let’s now see how this can be achieved in Raku:

#!raku

use MONKEY-TYPING;
augment class Str {
    method PostgreSQL() { "PostgreSQL is an amazing database!" }
}

say "Oracle is my favourite database!".PostgreSQL;

The example is pretty much the same as its Ruby counterpart, except that it refers to the Str class that is the Raku version of the Ruby String. The method PostgreSQL is added similarly. The trick here is that you need to inform Raku that you are going to do something potentially dangerous as extending an existing class, and you inform Raku about your intentions with the augment special keyword. However, that does not suffice: you need to double assure Raku you know what you are doing by using the MONKEY-TYPING pragma.
The final result is the same as for the Ruby implementation: