From: Dan Doel <djd15@...>
Date: 2004-01-31T07:59:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Accesing to private attributes

You can do it.

[dolio 05:55:13 ~]$ cat prac.rb
#!/usr/bin/ruby

class Foo
        attr_reader :bar
end

obj = Foo.new

obj.instance_eval { @bar = 3 }

p obj.bar
[dolio 05:55:17 ~]$ ./prac.rb
3
[dolio 05:55:23 ~]$

However, I think that, generally, this isn't a bad thing. In both Ruby and
Python, it's obvious what you're doing. You're not likely to type that in
by accident.  Hiding instance variables may be good programming practice,
but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to get at them if it's 
absolutely
necessary.

You shouldn't use that kind of thing a lot, but you have to trust people not
to be stupid.

- Dan