From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2002-10-17T04:53:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Psyco

Paul Brannan <pbrannan@atdesk.com> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 03:10:38AM +0900, Dave Thomas wrote:
> > Now admittedly, the runtime could do some work to handle this, but it
> > could be hard, particularly in the face of 'eval' and friends. You
> > might have to keep the old bytecodes lying around, and reactivate them
> > if you ever determine any operators such as '+' had been changed.
> 
> Why allow the user to change the definition of Fixnum#+ to begin with?

I don't know about '+', but I quite often change definitions of
built-in operations. One of my current favorites is

   class NilClass
     def empty?
       true
     end
   end

   p nil.empty?

Very useful for Web systems.

If I can productively change operations in NilClass, then it would
seem consistent to give me equivalent access to Fixnum.

Or, or course, we could implement C# or Java where ints are native and
have to be boxed before use. I wouldn't like to see this.



Cheers


Dave