From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2005-12-16T22:57:23+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] scoped_require 0.0

Mauricio Fernandez wrote:

>You also dislike alias_method, don't you? ;-)
>  
>
I tried to pollute the namespace as little as possible. (And then I 
refactored and created Module#find_or_create_module, but whatever.) I 
also tried to be as 'cute' as possible (but that was a tertiary concern).

>wouldn't that break code like
>
># foo.rb
>class String
># instead of class ::String
>  def foo; "foo #{self}" end
>end
>  
>
Good point, yes... I suppose I could inject #clones of the toplevel 
namespace's constants into the container module... 'twould be a little 
performance-heavy, so maybe I'd make that an option, � la:
    require 'foo', :module => :Foo, :import => [String, Hash]
Would that work? Do you have a better idea?

>There's another tricky issue regarding the transitivity of scoped_require:
>
># a.rb
>require 'b', :module => :B
>...
>#=================================================================
># b.rb
>require 'something'
>...
>#=================================================================
># app.rb
>require 'a', :module => :A
>
>Should 'something' be scoped to B, A, A::B, or not at all?
>And if it is loaded under some module, should it be added to $"?
>  
>
I should be deadling with that, now. Without running the above code, I'm 
pretty sure 'something'll get loaded under A::B. And my require override 
uses @__require_feature rather than $", so it's specific to each 
container module.

Although, admittedly, I probably could use a couple of unit tests to 
test the interaction between scoped requires and non-scoped requires 
(and $").

>So it seems scoped_require would work best with 1-file libs that don't
>mess with code classes. In other cases, it could still be useful: there's
>nothing wrong with encouraging lecture ;-)
>  
>
Well, definitely more than one file -- it was in my requirements (using 
RubyfulSoup) that nested requires work.* But yeah, I couldn't imagine 
that require 'rails', :module => :Rails would work. :P

Thanks for the feedback. I may add the import thing later.

Devin
* Well, sort of. It's actually the main file, rubyful_soup.rb, that 
defines the Tag class, not its dependency, sgml_parser.rb, so I could've 
gotten away with not handling nested requires. But I was having fun... :)