Re: Tricky DSL, how to do it?

Hi Luke, 

I think your idea about the "outside" is on the right track. I ended doing 
something akin to that, but in my case the "outside" is just toplevel (aka 
<main>).  Your solution is defining methods on the class of the outside 
object. It gets the desired results, but at the expense of polluting the 
class's namespace. In my case, using toplevel, that actually might not be a 
problem, so yea, this might be a workable solution. But I found using 
methods had some other limitations (e.g. problem evaluate it in another 
scope). So I ended up doing something a bit different, but at it's core 
it's the same approach as yours, just without the method definitions. The 
"trick" I came up with was:

      def block.call(*args)
         ::Kernel.eval('self',::TOPLEVEL_BINDING).instance_exec(*args, 
&self)
      end

This defines a singleton method on the block overriding the original #call 
method, forcing evaluation of the block at the toplevel. Once I had that 
working, I refactored so I could get the same result but without have to 
monkey patch the Proc object. So far so good.

If you are interested in the actual project code, it is here:  
https://github.com/rubyworks/confection/blob/master/lib/confection.rb

Thanks for the help.