From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2011-09-13T12:48:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Any downsides to writing paranthesises?


On Sep 12, 2011, at 9:19 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> 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.

I think the "uniform access principle" is a good one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_access_principle).  I was just flagging the "public variable" terminology, which I don't think is meaningful in a Ruby context. Instance variables are never directly accessible in Ruby so there is no concept of access control to instance variables.  They must be accessed through instance methods (Kernel#instance_variable_get is the "loophole" to this but even that is a method and not simply syntax).

Gary Wright