Yes, and of course I do. I respect other people enough that I want to provide a tool that just works, for a sufficiently large number of client classes.

If you only care about "a sufficiently large number of client classes" anyway, maybe you should quit with what you have. Most classes are probably implemented as refs to hashes that don't include your 'safely named key', don't rely on the number of key/value pairs they contain, don't iterate through their own keys, don't use closures to privatize data, etc. Pretty much everything from there on out is a special case.

I noticed you mentioned Smalltalk in a reply to Abigail-II. The tools you described are development tools. They are designed to help a developer look into instance internals. That's a necessity. There is obviously a significant difference between looking at internals during development and changing them during runtime.

Good luck (and may the OO gods have mercy on you!)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";