From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielygalan@...>
Date: 2010-10-31T04:33:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Dynamically reference instance vars

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Greg Willits <lists@gregwillits.ws> wrote:
> Appreciate the effort, but the point has been lost. Don't focus on the
> hash or mass assignment, that was just a device to create an example.
>
> The question is whether there's a shorter way to do this:
>
>  my_object.send(:instance_variable_set, "@#{iname}", ivalue)
>
> In another language I used, I could simply do the equivalent of
>
>  myobject.iname = ivalue
>
> that's because the syntax was like this
>  #myobject->#iname = ivalue
>
> Where # denotes a local var, so it was obvious to the parser that #iname
> was not a method name, whereas with Ruby it's not obvious.
>
> I was hoping in Ruby that at least this was possible:
>
>  myobject.send(iname) = ivalue
>  --or--
>  myobject.send(iname, ivalue)
>
> but that doesn't work. I could maybe force it to work by manually
> creating setter methods, but that's not an elegant solution either, I'd
> rather have the occassional use of instance_variable_set than craft
> setters.
>
> Anyway, not a biggie, just a curiosity.

Crafting setters is pretty simple, though:

class A
attr_writer :a
end

a = A.new
a.a = 3

Jesus.