From: Dan Tenenbaum <dandante@...>
Date: 2006-12-12T05:28:11+09:00
Subject: best way to dynamically create new instance methods

Hi, I've been sifting through module_eval, instance_eval, define_method,
and the like and I can't seem to accomplish what I am trying to do,
which is something like this:

class Foo
  def initialize
    list_of_method_names =
get_list_of_method_names_from_some_external_function
    for method_name in list_of_method_names_do
      create_method(method_name)
    end
  end

  def create_method(method_name)
    # some magic here as yet unknown
  end

end

The list retrieval is in initialize() because the list is constantly
changing so I always want the most recent one when I initialize my
class.

What I want create_method() to do (simplified here) is, given the
argument "baz", add a method to the current instance of Foo that would
look like this if it were a traditional method (that is, not dynamically
created):

def baz(*args)
  args[0]
end

That seems pretty simple but I have run into all sorts of problems with
various ways of doing it. Rather than recount all those ways and why
they didn't work, I instead present the minimal example of the problem I
am trying to solve and hope that someone can solve it.

Thanks in advance.
Dan

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