From: Phrogz <gavin@...>
Date: 2007-02-17T04:50:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Oppinions on RCR for dup on immutable classes

On Feb 16, 12:30 pm, dbl...@wobblini.net wrote:
> You could conceivably have a case where an object can't be dup'd, but
> is mutable, like a singleton class.  If dup returns self, then you
> could end up changing the object when you didn't want to.  It's
> probably not an everyday problem... but I still don't like the idea of
> having to remember that "dup" means "dup or self".

Yes, but that would only be a problem if you did:
  class Object
    alias old_dup dup
    def dup
      self.old_dup rescue self
    end
  end

I would certainly not like that, either.

The OPs proposal, however, was to modify the behavior only for a
particular set of built-in immutable objects:
[NilClass, FalseClass, TrueClass, Fixnum, Symbol]

(Though, if you 'fix' Fixnum like this, you'll need to 'fix' Bignum
and Float and others as well to support duping.)