From: Kornelius Kalnbach <murphy@...>
Date: 2010-02-13T02:29:12+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:28158] Documentation for const_missing

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Hello!

I came upon this while answering Yehuda's const_missing proposal. The
current documentation for the method seems odd. Can we rewrite the
following rant in the documentation of const_missing?

     [...] The following code is a (very
     bad) example: if reference is made to an undefined constant, it
     attempts to load a file whose name is the lowercase version of the
     constant (thus class +Fred+ is assumed to be in file +fred.rb+). If
     found, it returns the value of the loaded class. It therefore
     implements a perverse kind of autoload facility.

It's not perverse, it's useful. If it really was a bad code example, it
should not be in the documentation at all (unless we want to say that
using const_missing is generally discouraged?). So, here's a more
neutral version, removing "(very bad)" and "perverse".

Patch attached (for trunk); earlier Ruby versions are affected as well.
[murphy]

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Index: variable.c
===================================================================
--- variable.c	(revision 26631)
+++ variable.c	(working copy)
@@ -1368,12 +1368,12 @@
  *  Invoked when a reference is made to an undefined constant in
  *  <i>mod</i>. It is passed a symbol for the undefined constant, and
  *  returns a value to be used for that constant. The
- *  following code is a (very bad) example: if reference is made to
+ *  following code is an example: if reference is made to
  *  an undefined constant, it attempts to load a file whose name is
  *  the lowercase version of the constant (thus class <code>Fred</code> is
  *  assumed to be in file <code>fred.rb</code>). If found, it returns the
- *  value of the loaded class. It therefore implements a perverse
- *  kind of autoload facility.
+ *  value of the loaded class. It therefore implements a kind of autoload
+ *  facility.
  *
  *    def Object.const_missing(name)
  *      @looked_for ||= {}

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