Throw exception when re-assigning a constant in Ruby?
by Ben
This has bothered me for a while, so I made a question on StackOverflow:
I’ve long been aware that “constants” in Ruby (i.e., variable names that are capitalized) aren’t really constant. Like other programming languages, a reference to an object is the only thing stored in the variable/constant. (Sidebar: Ruby does have the facility to “freeze” referenced objects from being modified, which as far as I know, isn’t an ability offered in many other languages.)
So here’s my question: when you re-assign a value into a constant, you get a warning like so:
>> FOO = 'bar' => "bar" >> FOO = 'baz' (irb):2: warning: already initialized constant FOO => "baz"Is there a way to force Ruby to throw an exception instead of printing a warning?