From: Remi Gillig <remigillig@...>
Date: 2008-06-14T19:49:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Reset the whole state

On Jun 13, 6:09 pm, Robert Klemme <shortcut...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 13.06.2008 16:57, Remi Gillig wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hello,
>
> > I just seached about this problem and found two 2 years old threads :
> >http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/87...
> >http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/3e...
>
> > Each of these talk about how to reset the whole Ruby state, like
> > starting from a clean interpreter but without rerunning it. More or
> > less like emptying everything and putting back the predefined
> > constants, modules and classes.
>
> > The first thread has a solution which is using remove_const to not be
> > able to create classes anymore but this actually does not work
> > properly because you can still do this :
> > # class Hello end
> > # $hello = Hello
> > # Object.instance_eval("remove_const :Hello")
> > # h = $hello.new
>
> > I'm quite surprised that there was nothing about this in over 2 years
> > of development. Maybe there are some explanation inside the Ruby
> > Hacking Guide but most of it is in Japanese.
>
> > Anybody has any idea on how to implement this? Thanks.
>
> I am wondering what you need that for.  I guess removal is pretty
> complex and thus time consuming because even a freshly started Ruby
> interpreter does contain some classes and method definitions.  And
> creating a process isn't that expensive.
>
> Having said that, maybe you can look at how Ruby can be embedded in C
> programs.  Then you could create a new initial context if something like
> that exists.
>
> Cheers
>
>         robert

It's actually embedding that I'm using right now. I am using Ruby as a
script language for a code editor to perform operations on text etc.
There is a script which is loaded when the program loads which
contains
some classes defined by the user for example. I would like to be able
to
reload this script without having warnings about constants, having
classes mixed together if the user changed the name of a function
between the loadings or still having the same global variables.

Remi Gillig.