[ruby-core:60454] [ruby-trunk - Feature #9453] Return symbols of defined methods for `attr` and friends

Issue #9453 has been updated by Joshua Ballanco.


Tsuyoshi Sawada wrote:
> What is the point of defining a private accessor method? You can directly refer to the instance variables without using accessors.

The example I gave was just one case of "code in the wild" that would benefit from this change. Undoubtedly, as more people begin to take advantage of the ability to build method decorators (now that method definitions return something other than `nil`), having the attr* family of methods return something meaningful will mean that they can also benefit from these decorators.


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Feature #9453: Return symbols of defined methods for `attr` and friends
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9453#change-44914

* Author: Joshua Ballanco
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Category: core
* Target version: 
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With Ruby 2.1 returning a symbol from `def` and `define_method`, that leaves `attr`, `attr_reader`, `attr_writer`, and `attr_accessor` as ways to define methods that still return nil. This is unfortunate, because it prevents the use of method decorators developed to work with `def` from also working with the `attr*` methods. Because these mechanisms can define more than one method, the return values would need to be arrays of symbols.

For an example of how this could be useful in real-world code, consider this sample from James Edward Gray II's Warehouse Keeper example (https://github.com/JEG2/warehouse_keeper):

    attr_reader :images, :key_map, :window, :screen_manager, :animations
    private     :images, :key_map, :window, :screen_manager, :animations

if `attr_reader` returned symbols, then this could be simplified to:

    private *attr_reader(:images, :key_map, :window, :screen_manager, :animations)

I've attached a patch that implements this change and includes a few tests. For those who use git, I've also submitted this as a pull request here: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/517

---Files--------------------------------
attr_rv.patch (3.23 KB)


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