Power, Responsibility and Tricksy VM Implementers

Posted by Rick DeNatale Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:05:00 GMT

In a ruby-talk discussion of the pleasures and perils of adding to or changing core ruby classes. A practice denigrated as “monkey patching” by some, but embraced as a powerful technique, when practiced with care, by others. Someone just reported an experiment involving changing a basic core method: 
 Fixnum.class_eval do
   def +(number)
     self - number
   end
 end

The result: It blew up his irb.

Ruby certainly gives a lot of power. A little, and in some cases a lot, more than most popular OO languages. Read on..

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