Thursday, February 15, 2007

Ruby Evaluation options article on InfoQ

Yesterday, I published a fairly long article on InfoQ about Evaluation Options in Ruby. The article covers eval, instance_eval, class_eval and provides examples of using each of them.

Feedback welcome.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:10 AM

    That was a very interesting read. Thanks for the link.

    Umm... could you please (re)explain why your second form of attr_init was better optimized than the first form?

    I couldn't understand this: "It was not obvious at first to me, but the following solution is far superior since it only requires one call to eval instead of a new eval with each call to the defined method." To me it seems both forms result in the same number of eval calls. What am I not seeing?

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  2. Anonymous9:23 AM

    Aman

    I created an example, but it's a bit long and looks much better on pastie.

    http://pastie.caboo.se/46177

    If you copy that example and execute it, you'll notice that the call to attr_init_optimized causes an eval to occur; however, all the calls to baz do not require an eval. Conversely, the call to attr_init does not require an eval, but each call to bar causes an eval to occur.

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  3. Anonymous2:40 PM

    Thanks, Jay! The example helped.

    Basically, in the unoptimized case, the eval statement became part of the method you were defining and hence got executed each time the defined method was called; whereas in the optimized case, the eval statement was not part of the defined method itself (as it wasn't within it): the contents of the method were fixed when the method itself was defined using eval. :-) I should have caught that.

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