From: Christopher Dicely <cmdicely@...>
Date: 2009-03-08T18:47:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Can I access or find a object from it's instance variable?

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 1:29 AM, Leo <minilith@gmail.com> wrote:
>> class Foo
>>   attr_reader :key
>>
>>   @@instances = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = []}
>> [...]
>>   def initialize(key_val)
>>     @key = key_val
>>     @@instances[key_val] << self
>>   end
>> end
>
> I don't know ruby well enough but I'd assume a weak reference would be
> preferable -- unless the script won't run very long anyway.

Yeah, in most real-world cases using this basic design, you're
probably going to want to either use weak references (and add code to
manage them so that dead references are silently cleaned up rather
than throwing exceptions, or provide an explicit ability to delete an
instance from the class-level index, depending on how you expect
objects of the class to be used.