Hi,

In message "Re: Random idea - private, blocks, constants"
    on Fri, 15 Dec 2006 04:15:06 +0900, "Daniel Berger" <djberg96 / gmail.com> writes:

|Do you object to the existence of private/protected then?  You could
|say the same thing for methods.  As I said, private is advisory only,
|but it does have its uses.  For example, code coverage automation tools
|could be configured to ignore private methods (which is what I'm
|guessing most of them do by default).

The demand for private constants are much lower than private methods,
since constants are not overridden by subclasses, i.e.

  class Foo
    Foo=1
    def foo
      p "foo"
    end
    def bar
      p Foo
      p foo
    end
  end
  class Bar < Foo
    Foo=2
    def foo
      "bar"
    end
  end
  Bar.new.bar

prints 1 and "bar", so that they need not to be protected by
visibility.  They are, even if they are accepted, just for narrowing
constants list.

							matz.