From: Christopher Dicely <cmdicely@...>
Date: 2011-05-27T23:47:16+09:00
Subject: Re: CORE - Object Instantiation and Location

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 2:35 PM, James Gray <james@graysoftinc.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 3:53 PM, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> On May 26, 2011, at 12:55 , Ilias Lazaridis wrote:
>>
>> > Is there something like "self.invocation_from", or how could this be
>> > implemented?
>> >
>> > Note that this should work on object model, returning a "living"
>> > object.
>>
>> BARRIER - Bad Design Smell
>>
>
> I laughed so hard!
>
> Just to make it clear for those following along:  this feature would violate
> multiple principals of object oriented programming and just good design,
> which is probably why there's not a big push for it.

While that's true, lots of Ruby has lots of features that, by default,
expose functionality whose use would violate principals of object
oriented programming and good design. This is generally a good thing,
IMO, because such design principals are generalities and, as such,
usually have specific instances in practice where excessive devotion
to them is counterproductive. The power to ignore them is often a good
thing for a language to have.

And, really, a frequently requested feature by Ruby users (which I
think was implemented in at least one Gem for pre-1.9 ruby, don't know
if there is anything that provides it for 1.9) has been something to
the effect of Binding.of_caller that would return the binding of the
point from which the current method was called; if such a method
existed, Ilias request would seem to just be solved by:

Binding.of_caller.eval { self }