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