From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2006-02-08T06:40:23+09:00
Subject: Re: marshalling constants

On Feb 7, 2006, at 11:38 AM, Brian Buckley wrote:

> Hello,
>
> When one marshals a constant and later unmarshals it, a brand new  
> object
> appears to be created during unmarshalling.  This seems wasteful,  
> especially
> in cases when constants are large (contain many attributes).  Is it  
> possible
> to customize marshal for a class (or for singleton objects of the  
> class) so
> that unmarshalling a constant simply returns the already existing  
> constant
> rather than creating a new one?  I've noticed Fixnum's exhibit this
> behavior.

How do you know that a Marshal string is identical to a constant  
without loading it?

Note that Ruby doesn't really have constants.  Instead it has frozen  
objects which aren't quite the same thing.

$ ruby
A = 1
A = 1
-:2: warning: already initialized constant A
$ ruby
s = ''
s.freeze
s.replace 'x'
-:3:in `replace': can't modify frozen string (TypeError)
         from -:3

-- 
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://segment7.net
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