What's up, RMers?

[kyonides]

Since certain people took a long time to notice what I was pointing out back then, I'll make it crystal clear now.

You would need to evaluate a string representing a method or an instance variable if there were no other way to access it.

My whole point is that you certainly can retrieve the actual object DIRECTLY by relying on symbols instead.

Here's where the instance_variable_get method comes in handy.

Code:

instance_variables.each do |sym|
  var = instance_variable_get(sym)
  puts var.class
end

It allows people to skip the evaluation, that is considered to be slow because it first has to parse the string and find out if it's supposed to be just text, a value, a variable holding any value, etc. (Followed very closely by a syntax check.) The method I mentioned here simply looks for the symbol and retrieves its actual variable from a list of instance variables. This means that it knows for sure what kind of object it's expecting to find there from the very beginning, and no longer needs a syntax checker to run at that point.

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That reminds me that I hate that cat.