From: Daniel Berger <djberg96@...>
Date: 2007-01-19T06:35:09+09:00
Subject: Re: auto assign arguments?


David Chelimsky wrote:
> I see where to put bugs and patches, but this is a feature request. Is
> this the right place to submit these?
>
> In any case, here's a feature request:
>
> I find that I do a lot of this:
>
> def initialize(thing, other)
>   @thing = thing
>   @other = other
> end
>
> One thing I'd love to see in a future version of ruby is this;
>
> def initialize(@thing, @other)
> end
>
> .. and have that automagically initialize @thing and @other with the
> submitted values.

I could have sworn Paul Brannan did this as part of RubyTreasures, but
I don't see any such thing mentioned in the docs.  I know it's been
done somewhere as a language hack.

Personally, I think it ought to be the default behavior, since it's
what you want about 80% of the time in practice I think.  At worst,
you've got a couple of useless instance variables that people would
have to go to pains to get at via instance_variable_get.  Heck, why not
take this a step further and create automatic getters and setters? You
can always undef or redefine them.

Regards,

Dan