From: Brian Palmer <brian@...>
Date: 2004-12-30T14:52:53+09:00
Subject: Re: #send and private methods

I certainly see what you mean--I can think of cases where it would be 
useful to bypass the private status of a method, as well.  I was curious 
how others felt, though.  The reason I ran across the #send behavior is 
this--I've been toying with different ways of writing a Infocom-style 
text adventure interpreter in Ruby, and one idea I had was a 'command' 
object or module that would contain a bunch of methods named after 
verbs, such as 'look' and 'west'.  Then I would just have the 
interpreter do a #send with whatever the user typed in, and let 
#method_missing handle the "I don't understand what you mean" type 
messages.  I was just a bit shocked when I discovered that typing 'gets' 
into my interpreter actually called the private method 'gets' (and I 
started thinking about what the adventurous adventurer could do with a 
well-designed #instance_eval command :)

But of course, this is easily avoided by checking whether #send would 
call a public method, or using the awesome "evil ruby" to make a class 
without Object and Kernel methods.  Not to mention that, while an 
interesting idea, it's not necessarily the most elegant way to do things 
anyway.

Thanks for the feedback!

- Brian Palmer

David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:

>> What's the rationale for having #send bypass the private status of a 
>> method?
>
>
> That it's endlessly useful to be able to mindfully sidestep the rules 
> when the pressures are right. I use this to much delight in various 
> places in Rails where I'm well aware of the fact that the call is to a 
> private, but I choose to anyway.
>
> To me, that's the essence of Ruby. Guidance, not constraints. Make it 
> ugly instead of impossible.
>
> Three cheers for a send that sidesteps visibility ;)!
> -- 
> David Heinemeier Hansson,
> http://www.basecamphq.com/   -- Web-based Project Management
> http://www.rubyonrails.org/  -- Web-application framework for Ruby
> http://macromates.com/       -- TextMate: Code and markup editor (OS X)
> http://www.loudthinking.com/ -- Broadcasting Brain
>
>
>
>
>