From: eden li <eden.li@...>
Date: 2007-03-16T12:38:35+09:00
Subject: Re: When introspection doesn't...

The power of Ruby :)  Everything can be redefined or undefined,
although there are a few warnings that Ruby will complain about:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> class C; undef_method :__send__, :__id__; end
(irb):1: warning: undefining `__send__' may cause serious problem
(irb):1: warning: undefining `__id__' may cause serious problem

You can also look at remove_method which will get rid of any methods
defined in your class after you've defined them, but it won't touch
anything in the super class.

You might have to resort to C to write the "super introspector" since
some of the internal data structures ruby uses aren't accessible from
the language itself (or at least that seems to be the case from the
cursory inspection I did on eval.c).

For instance -- I couldn't find any way to get the receiving class
from Method or UnboundMethod... they're locked up in struct METHOD
somehow.  The only hack I could come up with was to parse the output
of to_s:

class UnboundMethod
  def rclass
    to_s.scan(/: (\w+)[(#]/).flatten.map{|s|Object.const_get(s)}.first
  end
end

>> Array.instance_method(:[]).class
=> UnboundMethod
>> Array.instance_method(:[]).rclass
=> Array

On Mar 16, 3:13 am, Chad Lester <chad.les...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Also... it does kind of make wish there were some methods that one could
> not override, just so you can poke in and see what's going on without
> resorting to c programming.  Or maybe this would be better done with a
> special inspector object that knows how to inspect objects... I'll look
> for one, and then maybe write one if I can't find anything.