11.3. Working with Dynamic Features
Skynet became self-aware at at 2:14am EDT August 29, 1997.
—Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Many of you will come from the background of a static language such as C. To those readers, we will address this rhetorical question: Can you imagine writing a C function that will take a string, treat it as a variable name, and return the value of the variable?
No? Then can you imagine removing or replacing the definition of a function? Can you imagine trapping calls to nonexistent functions? Or determining the name of the calling function? Or automatically obtaining a list of user-defined program elements (such as a list of all your functions)?
Ruby makes this sort of thing possible. This runtime flexibility, the capability ...
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