From: Jingjing Duan <lists@...>
Date: 2012-07-06T02:16:50+09:00
Subject: Can you call private methods with explicit receivers?

My understanding is the answer is no, you can't call private methods
with explicit receivers, even self. See
http://www.skorks.com/2010/04/ruby-access-control-are-private-and-protected-methods-only-a-guideline/

However, the following example seems to counter that.

class A
  def m2
    self.m1 = "hello"
    self.m3
  end

  private

  def m1=(value)
    @m1 = value
    puts "assigning #{value} to @m1"
  end

  def m3
    puts "inside m3"
  end
end

A.new.m2

The output is:
assigning hello to @m1
/tmp/t.rb:4:in `m2': private method `m3' called for #<A:0x007fc4b404e568
@m1="hehe"> (NoMethodError)
         from /tmp/t.rb:19:in `<main>'

Why can m2 call self.m1= which is a private method?

$ ruby –v
ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-darwin11.3.0]

Best,
Jingjing

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