Incident No. 12: The Incident

A crew of news reporters was wandering the neighborhoods, looking for incidents to report. They found several to choose from and finally focused on a certain infestation of fruit flies. They were alarmed at the quality and intimacy of the footage they recorded that afternoon and found it difficult to leave the scene of the incident.

Taking some artistic license, the cameraman broadened the camera view to capture scenes of children who (hearing of the news crew) came to ride their bicycles and appear on the news. The cameraman continued to film one dark-haired boy and eventually followed the young man on to college at Stanford, also filming his adventures in London and the Slavic countries.

Some stayed and lived with the fruit flies and others evaporated at sunset.

Further Dementia

I got an e-mail response from ged/m.g. today concerning the demented wishes. He pointed out that Ruby 1.8 does have Class#define_method. So I peeked into rb_mod_define_method() to see how it works exactly.

As you’d suspect, Procs and blocks are basically converted to Methods. Given a name and bound to a class. Which has me wondering why all Procs shouldn’t just become Methods. The default would be for each block to be a method belonging to a singleton of a scope instance. That way you could access the methods of that scope and store metadata during a block’s execution.

Here’s some proof-of-concept code. There are certainly problems with this idea. It feels dangerous, but I figure that this is one entry on one small site and out of view. Please don’t squeal on me.

 class ProcScope
  attr :count
  def initialize( &p )
   class << self
    define_method( :proc_call, &p )
   end
   def call( *x )
    @count ||= 0
    @count += 1
    proc_call( *x )
   end
  end
 end

 class Array
  def each_p( &p )
   s = ProcScope.new( &p )
   each { |x| s.call( x ) }
  end
 end

 [ 'a', 'b', 'c' ].each do |x|
  puts count
 end

I’m still not sure what I think about the whole idea. It’s neat. Solves some problems. Creates some problems. I just know there’s a good angle on this. Looking for it…