6 ms·

Ruby really is a great language. The author just posted a poor example that is frankly NOT idiomatic Ruby. The proper way to create a getter and setter method o

• jfarmer 13y ago
  All the attr_* class methods do is define precisely the instance methods the author wrote by hand. Indeed, if attr_reader, attr_writer, and attr_accessor weren't part of Ruby's Module class you could write them yourself, like so: https://gist.github.com/jfarmer/6b4deeb8bcfbe030f876 https://gist.github.com/jfarmer/6b4deeb8bcfbe030f876 If using an "eval" method seems smelly to you, you can achieve the same result in pure Ruby using define_method, instance_exec, and instance_variable_get. There are good practical reasons to use module_eval, though. Regardless, I think the author's point was more that there's nothing "special" about getters and setters in Ruby. They're just plain ol' methods. As a class of methods we write them often enough that we've also defined a higher-order method that takes an instance variable name as input and dynamically defines those getters and setters on the underlying object. We wouldn't "lose" anything by not having attr_reader and friends, though. Our code would just be slightly more verbose.
  • effbott 13y ago
    >Regardless, I think the author's point was more that there's nothing "special" about getters and setters in Ruby. They're just plain ol' methods. Ah, that's a good point. That seems to be a more accurate interpretation of what the author was trying to express.