From: Mike Sassak <msassak@...>
Date: 2002-01-26T09:45:29+09:00
Subject: Re: "friend" alternative in Ruby?

On Fri, 2002-01-25 at 19:12, kate turing wrote:
> I have a class "Foo". It has a method "doSecretStuff" that I want to
> be callable from within class "FooManager". But I don't want
> "Foo.doSecretStuff" to be completely public.
> 
> I could compromise and just make "Foo.doSecretStuff" public. But
> surely there's a way. How would the Ruby experts accomplish this?

Hi Kate, 

Could you elaborate on how you want your program to work?

In particular, it _sounds_ like you might be doing something like this:

f = Foo.new
fm = FooManager.new
fm.manage(f)

where perhaps something like this might be more appropriate:

class FooManager
  def initialize
    @f = Foo.new
  end
  ... # rest of class here
end

fm = FooManager.new
fm.manage_foo

And of course, you can always use #send, but be warned, some consider
that an "evil method". :)  

-mike