On Jan 27, 9:05 am, Richard Roberts <ricisb... / yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Anyone else got views on this??

It looks like Ruby 1.9 will give you the ability to define private 
methods in the base class (which may be simple getter/setter methods) 
that are accessible to the base class, but not the descendents. Of 
course the subclass will still have access to the instance variables - 
in my opinion it would be madness to have 'inheritance' without this.