Talk:Add a variable to a class instance at runtime: Difference between revisions

:: The task description is certainly not clear enough if it means what you say it means, Donal. One reason for disagreement is now obvious to me: in Smalltalk, classes are objects like any other. So a "class instance" is just the run-time representation of a class, as opposed to "an instance of a class". But that's actually a minor point. The major point is that it refers to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch:Monkey Patch], which on Ruby and Python communities refers to changing a ''class'', not an object. That's so much true that one of the criticism leveled at monkey patching as practiced in the Ruby community is that sometimes different libraries perform incompatible changes to class used by both, and that is very difficult to track.