14.4. The eval family of methods
Like many languages, Ruby has a facility for executing code stored in the form of strings at runtime. In fact, Ruby has a cluster of techniques to do this, each of which serves a particular purpose but all of which operate on a similar principle: that of saying in the middle of a program, “Whatever code strings you might have read from the program file before starting to execute this program, execute this code string right now.”
The most straightforward method for evaluating a string as code, and also the most dangerous, is the method eval. Other eval-family methods are a little softer, not because they don’t also evaluate strings as code but because that’s not all they do. instance_eval brings about a temporary ...
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