From: avi@...4.com (Avi Bryant)
Date: 2002-04-07T07:16:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Is eval a code/design smell?

Sean Middleditch <elanthis@awesomeplay.com> writes:

>Accessors, of coure, can be made directly into methods at compile
time.

Compile time?  When's that??

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying about attr_accessor. 
As soon as the method attr_accessor is run, the method is
module_eval'd into existence (actually, it's in C, so the parse nodes
are generated directly, but in this case that makes no difference at
all - don't tell me I couldn't write a perfectly safe version of the
same thing that generated text instead).  It's not like eval() is used
every time the accessor is called, which is how you seemed to be
interpreting what I was saying.

But I really have no idea what you mean by compile time.  Hours into
the run of a ruby script, user input could trigger a call to
attr_accessor.  There is no way for a compiler to anticipate this. 
Ruby doesn't, and couldn't, without substantially changing the
semantics, have a compile stage.Maybe you mean at parse-time, but I
don't think we want the parser generating methods.