From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2007-08-31T23:12:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Pragmas in Ruby 1.9


On Aug 31, 2007, at 2:35 AM, David Flanagan wrote:
> 2) If we need to introduce more general pragmas, I suggest  
> overloading Kernel.require.  It should behave as usual if passed a  
> string.  But it can handle pragmas if passed a hash.  Some possible  
> examples (using Ruby 1.9 hash syntax):
>
>   require encoding: "utf-8"
>   require unsafe: "fibers"
>   require thread-model: "concurrent"
>   require version: 1.9
>   require decimal: true
>   require strict: true

It seems to me that you can't use a method based
solution to address a parse-time problem.  Declaring the
encoding of a source file must be done as part of the
parsing process--it can't be delayed until execution
time as suggested by your require-based alternative.

Instead of overloading 'require' and introducing all
sorts of confusion about when its effects become
active (parse time or run time) it seems like this is
a clear case for a new keyword with its own special
behavior.

Gary Wright