From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-16T23:50:54+09:00
Subject: Re: private variables

dblack@candle.superlink.net wrote:

> Personally I'd be sad to see any more double punctuation variable
> semantics in Ruby (@@cvar being the only one I can think of).  It's
> true that declaring things private (rather than tagging them as
> private with an underscore) means that one can't see privacy at a
> glance.  But that's already true of private methods -- i.e., their
> names are not required to be different from names of other methods.

Private methods and class-local instance variables are quite different.
If you use a private method, you get an exception. If you try to use
a class-local instance variable then you just use another variable,
which could lead to obscure bugs.
So I think punctuation (and it should be as short as possible)
is a much better option.

Best Regards, Christian