> |I am new to Ruby and this brings up a question I have had 
> lately.  Why
> |were the 'magic' global variables copied from perl? And $= which is a
> |new one.
> 
> They are tricks for short programs; 

I was considering how the magic global variables work too. Immediately I
came in the same conclusion:

> usage of these magic variables is
> not recommended in general.

And here we face the problem. Even if you behave, you *have* to rely on
other programmers behaviour and hope they behave too.

This means that you can't write

" now's   the time".split

(like the example at http://dev.rubycentral.com/ref/ref_c_string.html#split)

because if you happen to say 'require "foo"' and foo happens to change $;
(maybe even indirectly saying eval for something coming from file (really
bad :)) you're soon out of luck. So to be on the safe side you have to give
up the common idiom and write split everytime by specifying the whitespace.

On the other hand, I can't see any other solution here, than to peer review
and friendly force global usage out from RAA-modules.

	- Aleksi