This strikes me as a terrible, terrible idea. There are already two ways to declare a method private in Ruby (as the author of the post says). They are both simple, easy to remember and not especially verbose.<p>He has small quibbles with each method ('small' is his word, by the way, not my characterization), but still, to tweak the parser and create a special <i>def_p</i> keyword of his very own? How does he plan to share code with anyone else?