From: Eric Christopherson <echristopherson@...>
Date: 2011-09-13T10:19:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Any downsides to writing paranthesises?

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 8:09 PM, Gary Wright <gwtmp01@mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 12, 2011, at 8:23 PM, Dave Aronson wrote:
>> Yup.  :-)  Another reason to omit the parens is so that clients don't
>> need to be tweaked by adding or removing parens if implementation
>> moves between a function, a public variable (yes, generally bad
>> practice, but it happens), or a var with an attr_reader (ah, that's
>> better!).
>
> I agree with this except that there is no such thing as a 'public variable' in Ruby.  Not sure what you are referring to there.

And a var with an attr_reader is really just a method. I've seen this
justification of going without parentheses in a book, too, and it
didn't make any more sense to me then.

The only thing I can think of with respect to ease of tweaking is that
you could change between a *local* variable and a method without
changing the actual usages; but I don't see how that's very likely to
be an issue in practice.