From: "Pedro Côrte-Real" <pedro@...>
Date: 2006-07-25T19:33:38+09:00
Subject: Defining a method with an argument with a default value

I have this line in a class method to define an initializer:

define_method(:initialize){|value| @value = value}

But I want something more like this:

define_method(:initialize){|value=nil| @value = value if value}

which doesn't seem to be possible because of the "value=nil" part. Is
there some way to do this that isn't eval? Eval would work fine since
this is pretty static code and I have unit tests for it but I try to
avoid it if I can. I've only used it before for performance to turn
some code with runtime tests into eval-time tests.

Pedro.