From: Tom Sawyer <transami@...>
Date: 2002-12-27T17:12:12+09:00
Subject: viral arguments

thanks for all the response on the float problem. alot of people jumped on 
that one. guess everyone but me knew the answer. :-)

anyway, i'm sitting here coding my billy-bad-ass cgi accounting system, in 
yours truly, ruby, and i'm running into small sticky spots in which i want to 
keep a library i created pure for general use, yet i run into particular 
situations where the behavior needs a minor tweak to work. upon looking at 
these recoccuring catches, i started to develop a notion of "virus-like" 
arguments.

the idea is that rather then pass simple argumments, one could pass a little 
piece of code that would execute in the context of the method.

here's a foo example (vproc is like proc but viral):

	def foo(x)
		i = 1
		puts "#{x + i}"
	end

	puts foo(4) --> 5
	puts foo(vproc {i + 1}) --> 3

any thoughts? can ruby achieve something like this already?

-transami