From: Yuh-Ruey Chen <maian330@...>
Date: 2008-11-01T02:43:58+09:00
Subject: How to access to local variables in enclosing scopes?

I'm familiar with other popular scripting languages (JS and Python),
and I'm struggling to figure out Ruby's (inanely) complex scoping
mechanisms.

My questions are within the following example:

x = 10

def foo
	# how to access x from here?
end

class Klass
	# how to access x from here?
	def bar
		# how to access x from here?
	end
end

lambda { x } # I can access x here but why not in foo or Klass or bar?

I sincerely hope I'm missing something here. To me, the inability to
access local variables in an enclosing scope is very counter-
intuitive. I thought Ruby was supposed to be elegant? At the very
least, I expect some sort of "nonlocal" statement similar to Python,
e.g.

def foo
	nonlocal x
	# I can access x in enclosing scope now
end

And no, I don't want to have to use global variables - that would just
be pollution and would be incredibly unwieldy in large projects.
Frankly, if there was a way to access local variables in enclosing
scopes, there wouldn't even need to be a special global variable
concept.