From: Ryan Williams <mr.cruft@...>
Date: 2006-12-13T06:38:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Assignment method strangeness

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>
> As you can see in the first one.. even a single value passed to an
> assignment is parsed as an array. If you need multiple arguments to an
> assignment, you have to handle them inside the method body itself.
>
>
You are correct.  That's pretty useful, though you still can't pass in
blocks.

The reason I was interested in this was that I wanted to create some
attributes that could be assigned either a literal value, or a block that
returned the literal value when called.  Then you could do some really lazy
evaluation, as in:

test.a = { long_computation }
....
...in another scope...
....
test.a   # returns result of computation

Or you could use it to keep some objects in sync:

test.a = { some_other_object.b }
some_other_object.b = 42
test.a = 42

I guess the best route to this is either a new assignment-like method (
test.set_a) or test.a = Proc.new.

-RYaN

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