From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2003-10-16T09:14:10+09:00
Subject: Re: General Ruby Programming questions

Eric Hodel wrote:

> Simon Kitching (simon@ecnetwork.co.nz) wrote:
...
>>Is there any reason why Ruby allows private methods to be invoked like
>>this? (rather than provide a tidy alternative for problems like mine).
> 
> 
> I believe I'm giving a fairly accurate paraphrase of matz when I say
> that Ruby doesn't prevent you from writing sloppy code, it just makes it
> look ugly enough so that you don't do it.
> 

And if you really want to trap such calls you can override 'send':

module SafeSend
  alias evil_unsafe_send send
  def send( m, *args )
   msg = "No sending of private messages!"
   raise msg if self.private_methods.include? m.to_s
   evil_unsafe_send( m, *args )
  end
end


class Foo
   include SafeSend
  # ...
end