From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-11-04T07:50:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Dynamic message dispatch?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yukihiro Matsumoto" <matz@ruby-lang.org>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 03, 2002 4:39 PM
Subject: Re: Dynamic message dispatch?


> Hi,
> 
> In message "Re: Dynamic message dispatch?"
>     on 02/11/04, Paul J. Sanchez <paul@argelfraster.org> writes:
> 
> |    me> Suppose I have methods foo and bar.  How can I read a string
> |    me> from ARGV or input and turn it directly into the message
> |    me> dispatch?
> |
> |Sorry, I meant to say "How can I read 'foo' or 'bar' as a string
> |from...".  I'm not asking how to do the input, I can't figure out how
> |to convert a string into a method invocation on the fly.
> 
> send?
> 
>   self.send("print", "foo\n")

It seems to me that methods such as #send and
#define_method offer safer/saner alternatives
to eval.

In that vein: Suppose I had a config file
with lines of the form:
   var_name = string_or_number

It is tempting simply to read each line and
do an eval in order to grab this information
(or perhaps even do a require).

But this is not really safe if we assume someone
could accidentally/purposely put something ugly
in the file.

Is there a better way to handle lines of the
form country="United States" and size=256
without building a parser?

And BTW, are you still in North America??? :)
How did it all go?


Hal