From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2007-09-08T03:34:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby stupidities

On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 04:23:06AM +0900, Matthias W?chter wrote:
> > It's
> > just going to do what it does. So unless you're willing to read
> > through the entire source code base, for Ruby and all add-on
> > libraries, every time you make such a change, you're pretty much
> > accepting some very real risk.
> 
> I think that is what everyone who writes libraries has to do for 1.9/2.0 anyway.

Except that 1.9 makes an attempt to break as little code as possible
while still providing the new feature, so:

  "abc"[0] == ?a

is true in both 1.8 and 1.9.  It's not true with your code.

Putting the burden on the user to make their code comply with your
library is a mean thing to do, IMO.  It's why I dislike mathn so much.
If you can get the new behavior without requiring the user to change
their code, then you're in a much better situation.

I think this is where selector namespaces will come in very handy, once
we have them.

Paul