Chad, in your very long answer to Robert you forgot to quote the most
important part of his message:

> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:27:07PM +0900, Robert Klemme wrote:
>> Relax

2008/11/17 Chad Perrin <perrin / apotheon.com>:
> I believe reasonable people can come to
> different conclusions about what that meant.  In other words, I believe
> it's ambiguous.

Could you file a bug report on http://redmine.ruby-lang.org to make
the documentation less ambiguous to you? This way you'd help others,
who draw the same conclusions you did.

> Wouldn't it be even more handy, in the general case, to be able to set
> the offset in the file ahead a few hundred or thousand lines of text?  It
> certainly would have been more handy for me, especially since there does
> not appear to be any way at all to do so in Ruby from what I've seen
> without actually *reading* those lines from the IO stream (...)

Such a method could be handy, indeed, but it would have to do the
same: actually read all those lines from the IO. There's no other way
to do it.

Regards,
Pit