----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Mitchell" <quixoticsycophant / yahoo.com>
>
> It misleads users into thinking Mutex is more useful than it
> is, and they eventually get caught (like the original poster
> and myself).
>

good point - although in my case it's not so much not knowing that they
exist as being intimidated by the source code :-)

Granted in this instance I suppose it's not that difficult to fathom what is
going on - but just compare the easy to understand comments & code for in
thread.rb with the code + hardly any useful comments in sync.rb (ruby 1.8).
That was enough to put me off looking any further (although now as it
happens I am using sync.rb).

On the positive side - it's a great testament to the design of Ruby and its
included libraries that all I had to do was change one line, and my entire
system now uses Sync instead of Mutex :-)

> Why is Mutex even mentioned at all?  Ruby comes with a
> Ferrari and a Yugo -- and we're telling them to use the Yugo.

Presumably there is a performance penalty to pay to gain the extra features
provided by Sync and its ilk?  If not, then I'm 100% in agreement.

Cheers,
Martin