From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-03-30T06:24:46+09:00
Subject: Re: attr :<symbol>?

In article <4249BB65.7040102@alumni.rice.edu>,
B. K. Oxley (binkley) <binkley@alumni.rice.edu> wrote:
>Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> Florian's will only work on Ruby 1.8 or later and avoids some of the
>> concerns that people have around "eval".
>
>Being new to Ruby, what sorts of concerns?
>

Two main issues come to mind:

1) security.  What is someone malicious code that gets eval'ed? 
"system(\"rm -f *\")"

2) debugging. It can be difficult to debug code that depends on eval.  
Errors get reported, but you've got to match line numbers of the string 
passed in to the eval function and this can be difficult.

Phil