"Jim Weirich" <jim / weirichhouse.org> wrote in message
> You guys are talking past each other ...

I think so.

> Eric points to variable.c, which implements the policy annunciated by
itsme.
> And David correctly points out that the simple view of only looking at the
> instance variables does not paint the whole picture (e.g. freezing
arrays).

I was talking about the pure object model part of Ruby. In such a pure
object model, a[1] and a[2] are instance variables (some Smalltalk
descriptions calls these 'indexed instance variables' as opposed to 'named
instance variables'). How something is optimized in C is a different matter.

In any case, consider my postings as a point of view; it is a clean and
potentially useful one. The part about local variables was not central to
me; I was just looking for a bit more uniformity in treatment of all
variable bindings, even temporary (local) ones. It makes things like dynamic
binding more uniform to implement.

my 3 c