From: "trans.  (T. Onoma)" <transami@...>
Date: 2005-01-18T11:09:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Problems with Passive Arguments and refactoring

On Monday 17 January 2005 07:08 pm, Esteban Manchado Vel叩zquez wrote:
| Hi all,
|
|    Sorry for breaking the thread, I mistakenly deleted the old message.
|
|    The problem was: I did some code refactoring, and changed the number of
| arguments of some methods. I changed all the method calls.... except one or
| two. The thing is, the interpreter ate it up just fine, but the program
| crashed from time to time, and I had no idea why.
|
|    Some hours later, I realized I had _not_ changed a couple of method
| calls, so the method was receiving undefined arguments, and doing some
| silly random thing until it crashed.
|
|    That's it. Probably there are more problems, but that is what I recall
| it has happened to me (several times already, in fact), and one of the
| reasons I'm not particularly fond of Perl programming :-)

Not that you don't have a point. You do. But a number of things would catch 
errors "earlier" too, like static typing for example. But that's not Ruby's 
way. In general Ruby's philosophy is test first ( not that any of us do this 
most of the time, but we go back and pretend ;)  In so doing these kinds of 
errors will usually get caught. So while you have an argument, (IMHO) I don't 
consider it a strong one.

Thanks for the explanation,
T.