Is it acceptable practice to patch Ruby's base classes, such as Fixnum?

Question

I am still very new to Ruby (reading through the Pickaxe and spending most of my time in irb), and now that I know it\'s possible to patch classes in Ruby, I\'m

Answer 1

The safest way is to define your own class that inherits from the built-in one, then add your new stuff to your new class.

class MyDateTime < DateTime
  alias...
  def...

But obviously now you only get the new behavior if you declare objects of your new class.