From: ts <decoux@...>
Date: 2001-08-15T17:13:19+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19761] Re: Why not?: Assigning to self

>>>>> "N" == Ned Konz <ned@bike-nomad.com> writes:

N> I should have said "supertype". Clearly, if you swap a Class for an Array, 

 Even this don't work

pigeon% ruby -e 'a = []; Array.become Hash; p a'
-e:1: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.6.4 (2001-06-04) [i686-linux]
Aborted
pigeon% 

 Array and Hash has the same type (Class)

N> you're going to have problems. But Ruby is a dynamic language with untyped 
N> variables anyway; it's easy to pass the wrong type as an argument to a 
N> method. And few people who are comfortable with dynamic languages seem to 
N> have problems with this, since they know better than to pass the wrong type.

N> I don't see that introducing become() (if it could be done without affecting 
N> other parts of the language) would hurt, and it would help in those 
N> (admittedly uncommon) cases where it's warranted.

 Now if ruby is embedded in an application the result is just the crash of
 the application.

 There is a name for this : denial of service attack.

 This mean that if ruby has #become, as it is actually, all applications
 with ruby embedded must be changed, and the modification is to undef
 #become


Guy Decoux