From: Patrick Narkinsky <patrick@...>
Date: 2003-01-26T12:34:41+09:00
Subject: Reflection for instance variables?

Hi.  I'm brand new to Ruby, so please pardon if this question is naive, 
but I have not been able to figure it out. I would like to come up with 
a way to define a method in a superclass that would give me a list of 
variables in a subclass.  So:

class Father
   @h_test = "1234"
   @h_test2 = "12345"

   def Father.vars
     return self.instance_vars # This does not work.
   end
end

class Son < Father
   @h_test3 = "123456"
end

print Son::vars

## end listing

Would give me ['h_test', 'h_test2', 'h_test3'].  It seems to me that 
the key would be to get a reference to the Class object for the 
subclass, but can't seem to figure out how to do that. Suggestions?

(For the curious, I'm trying to do something in Ruby I saw in 
objective-c.  This class allowed you to define a subclass, define the 
variables in the subclass, then it would create the sql, etc. 
automagically.)

Thanks,

Patrick