From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2005-01-24T22:51:01+09:00
Subject: attr

In the upcoming release of Ruby Carats I have a little lib called
attr.rb.

What it does is define a mater #define_attribute which all attribute
defintions are routed thru. Then I redefine #attr (since current
definition is basically never used) to call #define_attribute that
takes multiple args. Here's an example:

..  attr :a, :a=

which is equivalent to:

..  attr_reader :a
..  attr_writer :a

It also has some extra freatures that are nice like:

..  attr :a?, :b!

which is the same as

..  def a?
..    @a ? true : @a
..  end
..
..  def b!(x)
..    @b.replace x
..  end

Also these return an array of the symbols of the methods that get
defined, so you can use public, private, protected on them. eg.

..  private attr :a

There are a couple of other features too, but I'll leave those aside
for now, as they are not important to this inquery.

So I have a few questions. First, what do you think of this in general?
Second, there is no "extra" convenient way to do an accessor b/c I
haven't been able to find a nice notation --one just has to put both,
'attr :a, :a='. Is this too inconvenient? Can anyone think of a good
notation?

Thanks,
T.