From: Jeff Rose <rosejn@...>
Date: 2006-05-10T23:49:37+09:00
Subject: where do you require?

I was reading through some of Why's parkplace code this afternoon, and I 
saw a couple things I wanted to ask people about. 
(http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/parkplace/browser/trunk/lib/parkplace.rb)

1) What's the effect of doing a require inside a method like in 
ParkPlace#config or ParkPlace#serve?  It's just a method right, so it 
will re-require every time the method is called?  Since it's getting 
loaded inside a method does it garbage collect the library after the 
method returns?  (Maybe do it to save memory?)  What's the behavior with 
bindings that use dynamically linked libraries?

2) What is this type of class definition all about:

module ParkPlace
   class << self
     def foo
     end
   end
end


It seems to be creating singleton methods the same as doing this, except 
with more typing:

module ParkPlace
   def ParkPlace.foo        # or def self.foo
   end
end

Thanks,
Jeff