[LRUG] What makes a truly horrendous Ruby hack?

Paul Battley pbattley at gmail.com
Tue Sep 9 01:21:41 PDT 2008


Dan's talk yesterday reminded me of another horrendous hack I wrote a
couple of years ago. It lets you do PHP/Perlish things like 1 + '2' ==
3:

http://po-ru.com/diary/ruby-heresy/

Writing it taught me a lot about how Ruby's coercion mechanism works.
As Dan showed, these kinds of hacks can be quite illuminating. But
knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not trying to
put it in a fruit salad. Don't put them in your production code!

Paul.



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