From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-03-06T04:37:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:12052] Re: RCR: shortcut for instance variable initialization

Dave Thomas <Dave@PragmaticProgrammer.com> wrote:
>
>r2d2@mao.acc.umu.se (Niklas Frykholm) writes:
[...]
>      def fred(param1, param2, anotherparam)
>        @param1, @param2, @anotherparam = param1, param2, anotherparam
>
>        ...
>
>has a couple of inherent problems.
>
[...]
>I'd still like to find a way to do this without duplicating the names.
>
Well if not duplicating the names is the point, you could
always make the temporary variables have names that have
nothing to do with the variables you are actually setting.

/duck

OK, ok, on to a more serious note.  I don't have a good
suggested syntax, but how about we generalize the desire
for a second and think about where that leads?  If you
have written your attr methods, your temporary variables
actually all correspond pretty closely to methods that
you have already.  For instance:

  attr_accessor :foo

will have created methods foo and foo= for public access to
@foo.

Am I right that you would be happy if you could just call
foo= directly?

I can't think of what it should look like, but there might
be a number of uses for a syntax that allows you to easily
preprocess your argument list in a variety of ways.  (One
idea bubbling in my brain is named function parameters.)

So can anyone think of more uses for the idea or (far more
importantly) what a reasonable syntax might be?

Cheers,
Ben
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