From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-06-08T11:06:28+09:00
Subject: Re: case of sub! not working

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Garamond" <lists@zara.6.isreserved.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 8:53 PM
Subject: Re: case of sub! not working


> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> > |how about making the interpreter running a $ENV.freeze at the beginning
of
> > |the program?
> >
> > Do you mean freezing strings from ENV?  Hmm, maybe.
>
> don't take this seriously...
>
> what if ENV's []= doesn't return strings, but string-like objects (or
> instances of some subclass of String) that has a custom sub! (and all
> other MODIFY! methods) containing setenv?
>
> perhaps that could complete the hash-like illusion of ENV? :-)

Someone posted a solution like this and it got me
to thinking...

The problem is: What if you do this:

   str = ENV['foo']

and then 100 lines farther down, you do:

  str.gsub!(/this/,"that")

It's not obvious that this statement is
going to change the environment. So I think
this is a bad idea in general.

Cheers,
Hal