From: Stephen White <spwhite@...>
Date: 2001-07-25T15:53:28+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18513] Re: Basic OO Tutorial, Ruby & Perl

On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, ts wrote:

>       def initialize(name = "an unnamed #{self.class} ")
>          @name = name
>       end

To eliminate the following problem:

  a = "hello there"
  b = Horse.new(a)     => #<Horse:0x401956b8 @name="hello there">
  a << "elljfeh"
  b                    => #<Horse:0x401956b8 @name="hello thereelljfeh">

This would be better defined as:

  def initialize(name = "an unnamed #{self.class} ")
    @name = name.dup
  end

Whether this is worth doing is another question, since there's an awful
lot of code out there that just assigns to an instance variable and it
doesn't appear to be a problem, strangely enough.

-- 
  spwhite@chariot.net.au