Pat Maddox wrote: > > Personally, I have no use for closing a class. If I were to write an > app to be used in a financial or health care organization, I would > probably want to be able to write some code with the knowledge that > nobody could arbitrarily change it. > > Perhaps I shouldn't even be commenting because I don't have any > real-world experience with designing these kinds of apps. It just > seems to me that the main point is that sometimes a business has > requirements with a very high cost of failure. In these specialized > instances, I think it's more than reasonable to protect your code. Right. And in those cases it may make sense to use a different language. Various degrees of security often come with corresponding development costs. For me, those day-to-day costs aren't justified for what I write; the pros and cons of Ruby work out quite well. But, just as one might prefer C to Ruby when speed is the main concern, a different language might be called for to satisfy other needs. Better to change languages than to change Ruby. -- James Britt http://www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation http://www.artima.com/rubycs/ - The Journal By & For Rubyists http://www.30secondrule.com - Building Better Tools