From: daniel@... (Daniel Cremer)
Date: 2004-07-26T19:21:54+09:00
Subject: code introspection

Hi,

Is there a solution to do code introspection rather than introspection
at the level of the Module/Object ? I can't figure out if I'm looking
for something that isn't there in Ruby since I've been reading C# code
or if I'm missing something. Let me explain my problem.
I would like to load ruby source files and dynamically create objects
from classes located inside these sources. It's one class/object per
source file and I can  make it so that a string from a configuration
file holds the name of the class. However I can't figure out a good
way to use that string to get to the class in the source file.

I could use eval but am really uncomfortable with that for obvious
reasons (people keep saying it's evil so I don't play with him). The
other solution I came up with was to add a method in the same source
but outside the class to return the desired object:

--------------source file---------
class MyNewClass
....
end

def create_loaded_class()
  return MyNewClass.new()
end
---------------------------------

Then as I require the source files I can successively invoke the
create_loaded_class method. This works but can get quite messy as
there are a lot of things to consider if you need to reload sources
and create new objects etc.
Please tell me I'm missing something obvious :).

thanks,
Daniel