Re: A couple of bugs?

Tomas Matousek wrote:
> I don't think Class.new should create a new constant. I think it would be much cleaner if it optionally took a symbol for the name of the class to create. You can then assign the result (i.e. an anonymous or named class) to whatever constant/variable you want:
> 
> Foo = Class.new(SuperClass, :Foo)
> 
> This would have a nice property that once a class is created its name couldn't be accidentally changed (whether it's anonymous or not). Should setting of the name of an anonymous class be a desired feature I see no problem to add name= method that will do so. Of course the method would throw an exception if the class is not anonymous.

I agree it would be a nice addition to the API. At the moment, it would 
require that you also specify a superclass though, since superclass is 
an optional parameter. So if you want to create a class extending object 
named Foo, you would have to Class.new(Object, :Foo). Perhaps not a big 
deal.

Either way, I know that the first-const-assign... (or however it 
actually works) behavior is necessary for at least a few apps. We 
explicitly had to fix it at one point. That's not likely to change, and 
even if the API were updated there's code out there depending on that 
behavior.

> BTW: It's not the first-const-assign-..., as one may think looking at simple examples.

That's how we've implemented it, and we've run into no issues as a 
result. We only ever set the first constant assigned as the name.

- Charlie