From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2003-05-16T06:26:33+09:00
Subject: Re: public/protected/private syntax

Guillaume Marcais wrote:
> I tend to find the public/protected/private keywords in Ruby a little odd. 
> They don't seem to fit the Ruby syntax. What about the following syntax (for 
> Ruby 3.0 :)? The scope of the method would be known by the first caracters of 
> its name, the same way as the scope of a variable is determined by $, @, @@ 
> or nothing. So:
> 
> class Test
>   def method1; end   # public method
>   def _method2; end  # protected method
>   def __method3; end # private method
> end

But, in ruby, many methods that you can use without a receiver are in 
fact private methods of all objects. For example, #puts, #gsub, 
#require, #fork, ... (most if not all of these are actually inherited 
from Kernel).

That means you would have to type

__require 'mylib'

all the time.