Hacking Ruby's Syntax

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.

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 def_p keyword of his very own? How does he plan to share code with anyone else?