From: dvandeun@... (Dirk van Deun)
Date: 2006-02-21T21:23:31+09:00
Subject: Re: dirty ranges

For the people who remarked (quite sensibly, of course) that you just
shouldn't do that, tinker with the endpoints of a range: it works
the other way too, of course:

irb(main):001:0> rng="a".."z"
=> "a".."z"
irb(main):002:0> arr=rng.to_a
=> ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l", "m",
"n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "v", "w", "x", "y", "z"]
irb(main):003:0> arr[0][0]="z"
=> "z"
irb(main):004:0> rng
=> "z".."z"

Something like this may be more likely to be a real problem.

The begin/end versus min/max I obviously didn't know, but then again,
if max is an ad-hoc constructed object, shouldn't min be too, if
only for symmetry ?

Hacker-Dirk likes Ruby, but Computer-Scientist-Dirk tends to be wary
of systems with irregularities like these...

Dirk van Deun
-- 
Ceterum censeo Redmond delendum