From: Dan Doel Date: 2004-02-03T05:44:36+09:00 Subject: Re: Destructive String Methods Well, here -- http://www.rubycentral.com/ref/ref_c_string.html -- is the reference for the Ruby String class. The first thing that comes to mind is going through the list, finding destructive methods, and overriding them in your subclass with a call to some update function, like so: class String def chop! super update end # ... def update # invalidate the cache somehow end # ... end - Dan