From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-07-13T17:10:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposal: runtime-modifying Kernel methods should be keywords

Nobuyoshi Nakada wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> At Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:09:40 +0900,
> Nobuyoshi Nakada wrote in [ruby-core:11650]:
>> gsub sets $_ in the caller's scope.
> 
> Sorry, it sets $~, the methods set $_ are IO's methods, #each,
> #gets and so on.

Evan made a good point on IRC...perhaps both $_ and $~ should be treated 
as keywords and parse to specific nodes, like $0, $1, etc do. Anything 
that can be statically observed ahead of time works just as well to 
"fall back" on classic behavior, and if we could detect $_ and $~ that's 
just as good.

(and FYI for those that don't know...the reason we can't detect them now 
is due to global var aliasing:

alias $MY_NAME $~

~/NetBeansProjects/jruby $ ruby -e "alias \$FOO \$1; 'foo'.gsub('o', 
'a'); puts \$FOO"
-e:1: can't make alias for the number variables
alias $FOO $1; 'foo'.gsub('o', 'a'); puts $FOO

...which perhaps is a feature that should also be considered for 
removal, and we could just make the English.rb aliases official)

- Charlie