From: Sean O'Dell <sean@...>
Date: 2004-06-22T02:35:42+09:00
Subject: Re: About top-level method

On Monday 21 June 2004 10:23, Sam Sungshik Kong wrote:
> Hi, Sean!
>
> Thank you for the reply.
> You helped me understand half of the issue.
> As Object is a superclass of all classes (except for Object),
> if I add a method to Object, the metaclass of Object will have it too.
> That enlightened me a lot.
>
> However, there's one more thing to solve.
> When I define a method at top-level,
> it's Object's private instance method.
> So it can't be used like receiver.method.
> obj.my_f #-> Error because my_f is private.
> Object.my_f #->Error because my_f is private.
>
> The question is why irb ignores the error?
> Is it intentional or a bug?
>
> I also appreciate all other replies.

My guess is irb ignores the private flag to allow you to test what you wish 
from irb.  It's really just a debugging environment, so it makes sense to 
disable private flags.

	Sean O'Dell