From: Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T18:21:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Puts bypasses access restrictions on to_s?

On 7/29/06, Paul Battley <pbattley@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28/07/06, Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I read somewhere that "puts" calls "to_s" on an object to get a string
> > representation and then displays that. This seems to be correct in my
> > experience.
> >
> > My question is: how does puts bypass "private" restrictions to get the
> > value of to_s?
>
> Interesting question. I had a look at the C source, and it uses
> rb_funcall, which doesn't check private/protected, to call to_s.
>
> If you want to do the same thing, you can use this:
> rs.__send__(:to_s)

That seems wrong! Not that you can bypass access restrictions, which I
think you can do in many languages, but that 'puts' does so. Though
OTOH I'm sure there's a very good argument for 'puts' being
high-speed.