[ruby-core:29488] Re: Invalid names

Any thoughts?

From: Tomas Matousek [mailto:[e-mail]]
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 11:45 AM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [ruby-core:29396] Invalid names

I wonder what your opinions are on using invalid method names in define_method.

Ruby allows it today and some frameworks (e.g. shoulda) depend on it.
On the other hand some frameworks depend on method names returned by methods, instance_methods, etc. being correct method names. The pattern methods.each { |m| eval("def #{m}(...) ...") } is used quite frequently.

Methods that define other members - instance variables (instance_variable_set), class variables (class_variable_set), constants (const_set) - don't accept invalid names. A NameError is raised.
Shouldn't define_method also raise NameError if the argument is not a valid method name and the code that depends on this behavior be fixed? Or, if considered useful, shouldn't arbitrary names be allowed for constants, instance variables and class variables as well?

Tomas