From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2003-07-18T02:17:42+09:00
Subject: Re: What's the point?

In article <20030717103702.A3418@freeze.org>,
Jim Freeze  <jim@freeze.org> wrote:
>Hi
>
>I've known for some time that methods can be defined inside
>methods, but I am still wondering what's the point.
>
>  def fred
>    def x
>      puts "x"
>    end
>    x
>  end
>

Used to be you couldn't do that; apparently, it's new in 1.8.

As to your other question about "why?"  - Sometimes I used to do this in 
Perl to localize some functionality within a method (..errr, function or 
subroutine in Perl parlance).  Usually this was in a sort of refactoring 
stage where I'd look at my sub and find that I had some duplicated code in 
it that I could collect into another sub-sub.

BTW: It seems that whenever I look at Python code (which isn't too often) 
I see this being done.  So I guess when something is possible it will get 
used.

Phil