I noticed you labeled this `public`.  Do you have a use case in mind?  In general, I tend to favor keeping this kind of thing private (in terms of documentation, but it'll obviously still be public in terms of ruby's visibility) until a user asks for it, given that it's not really the point of this feature and is merely a supporting detail.  The more implementation details we declare to be private, the more latitude we have to refactor w/o breaking user code.