comex on Rubinius X, an experiment in modernizing Ruby

Global Variables

Gone. Period.

That's pretty extreme. What is supposed to replace them?

It's not really extreme. You can, and should, easily provide globals through attributes on classes and modules (which are globals themselves):

    module Foot
      @size = 10
      class << self
        attr_accessor :size
      end
    end

    Foot.size = 8

ActiveSupport gives you "mattr_accessor" and "class_attribute" to accomplish the same thing with less code.

In my opinion, class/module-level attributes are useful enough that it ought to be provided by the language itself.

Edit: Come to think of it, most people, that I have seen, use globals to set constants. That currently has perfectly good syntax:

    module Foot
      SIZE = 10
    end

    print Foot::SIZE

Sans ActiveSupport, you can achieve the same things by just opening class/module eigenclass:

    module Foo
      class << self
        attr_accessor :bar
      end
    end

    Foo.bar = "baz"

Sure, but wasn't that exactly what I wrote in my first example?

Oy, it is. Sorry; my brain is apparently missing its reading comprehension hat today.

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