From: Sy Ali <sy1234@...>
Date: 2007-07-16T07:16:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Contents of variable as variable name

On 7/15/07, Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@anthropohedron.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 12:10:52PM +0900, Rob Kerfia wrote:
> > I know that sounds a bit crazy, but is there a way to do that?
>
> Don't do it. If you think you need to, it is indicative of bad design.
> There are significant dangers involved. The following is about Perl rather
> than Ruby, but the concept is the same:
>
> http://perl.plover.com/varvarname.html
> http://perl.plover.com/varvarname2.html
> http://perl.plover.com/varvarname3.html

Thanks for the reading.  This helped me avoid learning a Bad habit.

This comment from the second document summed it up for me:
  The real problem is that if your string contains something
unexpected, it will sabotage a totally unrelated part of the program,
and then you will have one hell of a time figuring out the bug.

Now the next time I itch to do something like this I'll explore using
a hash instead.