From: Sean O'Dell <sean@...>
Date: 2004-06-29T04:43:34+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Is it considered Harmful?

On Monday 28 June 2004 12:09, Bill Kelly wrote:
>
> When I read Guy's response, I interpreted it as calling attention
> to two peoples' differing notions of what "it worked" would mean
> in this context.  Not as a personal attack, but rather...
>
>  Guy: It doesn't "work" because you can trivially crash Ruby with
>       just changing an Array's class to a Hash. etc. etc. etc.
>       [Guy has understood this from the start and has been saying,
>       ergo, the criteria for "working" has not been satisfied.]
>
>  Sean: My hack functioned the way I expected it to, therefore,
>        even though it's not totally stable and I wouldn't want
>        it accepted by matz, "it worked".
>
> This is why--to me--what Guy wrote does not register as a personal
> attack.  You both have different criteria for what constitutes
> "it working".
>
> Oddly, Sean, when you are saying, "it worked like I said it could",
> I am hearing Guy saying, "yes - but it doesn't work like I said it
> wouldn't."

Oh no, I didn't mean it was TOTALLY stable.  I just meant it appeared stable 
to me and I wanted some people who knew better about the Ruby internals to 
make an assessment, which is why I brought it up in ruby-core.  I didn't mean 
to imply it was completely safe under all circumstances, just that with some 
work, it COULD be.  I know myself from looking at the internals, at how many 
places where code assumed the type of self, that it was likely there were 
lots of nooks and crannies that did the same thing and eventually someone 
would find a way to crash Ruby with the feature.  I meant, *I* found it to be 
stable.  I ran a few quick tests and couldn't find a way to crash Ruby with 
it.

In fact, I still have the feature installed here.  If someone could show me 
some Ruby code that makes Ruby crash with the #class= method I implemented, I 
would be more than happy to retract even that much.  Show me code that 
crashes my #class= implementation; I already assume it can be done, now just 
show me how.

	Sean O'Dell