On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 04:05:00 +0100, <dblack / wobblini.net> wrote:

>
> It depends what you mean by actively.  Dozens of people have certainly
> counseled against it, over the years.  The difficulty, for me, has
> always been how to harness this particular kind of flexibility and
> openness, a prospect I've always found more intriguing than the
> prospect of just deciding that it exists for the purpose of being
> avoided.  I think that if Ruby 2.0 has selector namespaces, we'll
> probably see some very creative and productive runtime class changing.

Nevertheless, it's nice to have it there. Heck, Rails runs on so much deep  
magic it ain't pretty, if it's not actually changing core libraries. And  
selector namespaces sound like a nice way to prevent gods know what  
including gods know what gods know where, causing the mother of all  
obscure bugs sooner or later.

>
> Or maybe not.  I've heard extremely little about anyone actually using
> any of the libraries that make block-scoped core changes possible.
> Maybe there isn't all that great a demand for orderly ways to do it.
>

Well d'oh. They're rare, and they usually give unconventional behaviour to  
existing code, I'd be very surprised if they were present in stable  
prouction-code due to the risks involved. But if I wanted to make lessay a  
symbolic calculator, the tweaks made by "mathn" would come in handy. And  
having Kernel#y present for YAML pretty-printed inspect is also very  
convenient, and I'd rather have it than read the slightly ugly *ducks*  
default inspects, or have to type explicit namespace references for  
something that trivial and frequently used.

David Vallner