From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-09-25T02:59:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Setting "variable" global variable ?

Johan Holmberg wrote:
> I think it is quite "ok".
> At least there is no extra copying (or serialization) of "val"
> as in my original example.

This is probably obvious and likely irrelevant, but I will mention
that a caller could do something malicious by passing in an "evil"
string to be evaluated.

> I didn't realize that the eval would "see" the value of "val",
> but apparently it does.

It sees everything in the current binding. For example,
x = eval("val") is the same as x = val. (There are probably some
strange exceptions to this.)

> But I'm still interested in a solution without "eval".

My impression is that without a Ruby builtin, it is not really
possible without eval.

Exceptions might be:

1. Maybe an extension could implement a method to do it.
2. You could do something crazy like write an assignment to
a file and then require the file... but it would fail under
many circumstances.

Hal