How do you do polymorphism in Ruby?

Question

In C#, I can do this:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        List animals = new List();

        anima         


        

Answer 1

All the answers so far look pretty good to me. I thought I'd just mention that the whole inheritance thing is not entirely necessary. Excluding the "sleep" behaviour for a moment, we can achieve the whole desired outcome using duck-typing and omitting the need to create an Animal base class at all. Googling for "duck-typing" should yield any number of explanations, so for here let's just say "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..."

The "sleep" behaviour could be provided by using a mixin module, like Array, Hash and other Ruby built-in classes inclue Enumerable. I'm not suggesting it's necessarily better, just a different and perhaps more idiomatically Ruby way of doing it.

module Animal
  def sleep
    puts self.class.name + " sleeps"
  end
end

class Dog
  include Animal
  def make_noise
    puts "Woof"
  end
end

class Cat
  include Animal
  def make_noise
    puts "Meow"
  end
end

You know the rest...