On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 jweirich / one.net wrote:
> Others have pointed out ways of doing this in Ruby.  I thought I would
> mention that this is rather questionable practice to begin with (even
> in Perl).  I think Mark-Jason Dominus explained it best in a three
> part article at ... http://perl.plover.com/varvarname.html

Well, I have to say that Mark-Jason Dominus is a nice and cool person and
everything, and I rather agree that var-vars are misused at
least on average, but it does not follow that var-vars are useless.

By the way, yesterday I wanted them and I did not have them; in my
particular case, I wanted to do:

binding.unknown(:a,:b,:c)

I had to do something like:

a,b,c=unknown(:a,:b,:c)

because even when i've got the proper binding passed, i can't create new
local-vars in it. (in case you wonder: the contents of a,b,c must know
their names such that a.inspect => "a" and so on)

It's for writing an algebra system in Ruby. You see, the thing in
ruby-talk/16387 and ruby-talk/16383 that can isolate a variable
(occasionally breaking rules of algebra, sorry), and puts too many
parentheses. Well, I added a few lines in it so that it can solve partial
derivatives (correctly, this time), and i renamed class Quote to class
Unknown, and i was trying to make the equations easier to type in.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                   http://hostname.2y.net/~matju