From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2003-03-21T17:41:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposal: new operator: '<-' (for assignments)

In article <2003320223415.480988@PADD>,
Austin Ziegler  <austin@halostatue.ca> wrote:
>On Fri, 21 Mar 2003 11:20:27 +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
>> Now of course, I could have allowed access to @val by declaring an
>> attr_accessor, but in many cases I don't want to expose that
>> information or make users of the class have to remember the name
>> of the variable 'val'. It just seems much cleaner in many cases to
>> have an assignment operator. Up till now I've been overriding '<<'
>> to do this, but now I've run into a case where I'd like to pass on
>> operators to the underlying value (@val in the example above)
>> using method_missing so the underlying value can be shifted (and
>> since '<<' is overriden, that's kind of tough).
>
>Array, String, and Hash use #replace to do this.
>

Perhaps, but I'm looking for an operator because:
1) it's shorter
2) the intent of '<-' is pretty clear (in fact it's often used for this in 
pseudocode)

Phil