From: Ben Bleything <ben@...>
Date: 2007-08-03T00:11:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Private methods not so private?

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007, Dan Zwell wrote:
> Ben Bleything wrote:
> >Yes.  send bypasses protection levels, for reasons I'm not really clear
> >on.  If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that what you send is
> >eval'ed inside the context of the object, thereby making self the
> >receiver, but that's a total guess.
>
> It is always possible to run private methods, change class variables, 
> etc. The way to do it is to reopen the class (or add an instance method) 
> that calls the private method or sets/gets the variable we need. Since 
> it's possible, why not make it easier? Ruby tries not to impose on what 
> the user can do, so we have foo.send, foo.instance_variable_set, and 
> foo.instance_variable_get.

Right.  I was just trying to answer the original question :)

Ben