From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2001-05-02T09:48:34+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:14521] Named parameters: Bright idea fizzles

One day, a semi-intelligent caveman named Hal
was thinking to himself about named parameters
in Ruby. 

He knew about the hash trick, but felt a primitive 
longing for something more. 

He also knew about Named Parameters in a 
Later Version of Ruby, but he hadn't caught onto 
the "passage of time" concept yet.

"Uh," he grunted as a ten-watt light-bulb appeared
over his head. "I'll just do it this way, using
instance_eval and a block."

  def myfunc(&block)
    instance_eval(&block)
    puts "#{a}  #{b}  #{c}"
  end

  myfunc {a = 3; b = 5; c = 7 }

Needless to say, it did not work. He cast a furtive
glance at his Cro-Magnon neighbors, hoping they would
not kick him out with the Neanderthals.

More appropriately, he tried eval instead. "Doh!" he
said, anticipating Homer Simpson by millennia. "eval
doesn't take a block!"

Just for good measure, he tried Object.instance_eval,
silly troglodyte that he was.

Help him out. Is there some wonderful reason instance_eval
takes a block, and eval does not? Is there some Nice Trick
that would work here?

Hal