From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-05-05T03:15:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Can a program be made to drop into irb?

Joel VanderWerf wrote:
> Ara's idea to pass a binding to Workspace.new is great. Changes to 
> locals are even persistent after you leave the shell. I'm puzzled about 
> why that works--maybe irb detects that the object is a binding?

Yes, that's what irb does. In irb/workspace.irb:

module IRB
   class WorkSpace
     # create new workspace. set self to main if specified, otherwise
     # inherit main from TOPLEVEL_BINDING.
     def initialize(*main)
       if main[0].kind_of?(Binding)
	@binding = main.shift

So you can get two useful effects with WorkSpace.new:

   WorkSpace.new(obj)

     Makes obj the self of a new workspace.

   WorkSpace.new(b, obj)

     Makes obj the self of a new workspace, and uses b as the binding.