Re: Idea: def ... end returns the symbolized version of the newly-defined method, instead of nil

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 4:41 AM, Peter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Not sure if you've ever worked on large classes in large Ruby/Rails projects
> (unless you want to count "possible code smell" as an argument against this,
> putting that aside for a moment) but if a "protected" or "private" block is
> fairly large, it gets difficult to see what's going on without doing
> "private :method_just_defined_on_previous_line" dozens of times (which to me
> is a different kind of smell, but some consider it a valid style).

We had this question about ordering large number of methods the other
day.  My stance is that you should not have that many methods in the
first place, i.e. it's a code smell.

And I prefer grouping methods by visibility because that makes it much
easier to understand the public API of a class - which is important
for users of a class.  Then you don't have the case of mixing public,
protected and private methods.

> Since a symbol is already created when a method is defined, and we are
> dealing with a functional language (or one with functional aspects), I just
> think it would be useful for a def to return something other than "nil", and
> it would nicely dovetail with the fact that "protected" and "private" can
> take symbol arguments. There are no extra costs involved.

That seems like a fair analysis.  Only that I am not sure about the
symbol being created.  But even if that would be an additional task
the overhead would probably not be too big.

>> Do note that your proposed "syntax" above is mostly achieved with 2 chars
>> added:
>
> No, actually that only works for the case of 2 methods, one protected and
> one private. If you have 10 protected methods and 10 private methods, the
> situation quickly becomes more complicated.

I think Ryan wanted to suggest to prefix *all* method definitions with
the visibility.  In that case it would work with more than two
methods.

Kind regards

robert

-- 
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