From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2007-05-27T03:30:37+09:00
Subject: Re: local variables vs. methods



On May 26, 9:35 am, Henrik Schmidt <no.s...@nspmaxyz.abc> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I've been playing around with Ruby for a while, but there's still one
> particular feature of the language that doesn't make sense to me. If you
> write a class containing a method and a class with the same name, the
> interpreter will pick the variable over the method, unless you
> specifically tells it not to. For example,
>
> class Foo
>
>    def output
>      puts foo            # "foo"
>      foo = 42
>      puts foo            # 42
>      puts self.foo       # "foo"
>      puts foo()          # "foo"
>    end
>
>    def foo
>      "foo"
>    end
>
> end
>
> Foo.new.output
>
> As seen above, there are several ways of getting around this, but this
> is the question: Why is this behaviour useful? As I see it, it's bad
> practice to give a method and a local variable the same name. At least I
> can't think of an example where it would make sense. Why not simply
> disallow this or at least have the interpreter issue a warning?

Perhaps we could ask about this from the opposite perspective. Would
it not be useful to define local methods --in method scope?

  def foo
    def bar; 10; end
    bar
  end

In effect then, a method is nothing more than a lazy variable having
it's own specific rules of scope. There's really no good reason to
restrict name clash.

T.