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djberg96 (2603)

djberg96
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Journal of djberg96 (2603)

Monday May 06, 2002
01:54 PM

Named arguments in Ruby

[ #4698 ]
One of the things I really like about Perl, especially when doing Tk programming, is named arguments.

Until recently, I didn't think this was possible in Ruby short of using an anonymous hash and parsing the hash in the 'initialize' method. However, Guy Decoux recently provided this idiom:

module SomeMod
   def initialize(attributes)
      attributes.each do |k, v|
         type.send(:attr_accessor, k)
         send("#{k}=", v)
      end
   end
end

sm = SomeMod.new(name=>'Dan',rank=>'SrA')
puts sm.rank #=> 'SrA'
sm.rank = 'General'
puts sm.rank #=> 'General'

Not only does this let you do named arguments with Ruby, it automatically provides get/set ability. Will Perl 6 be able to do this, hmmm?

The only downside is that you'll have to manually parse out any bogus attributes a programmer might try and create.


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  • Still no parameter checking though. It's a shame, as this is one area where Python still kicks both Perl and Ruby's ass.
    • I'll probably get slapped for this but, "so what?". I have never, ever missed this "feature" in either Perl or Ruby. I think Dave Thomas pretty well summed up my feelings about it here [google.com]

      I'm genuinely curious as to what advantage you think this would bring to Ruby, or whether or not you think this is a real selling point for Python.

      • Sorry, I realised later the subject of my post wasn't what I meant.

        I meant simply that this sort of thing (named params) should be built in, with checking done on the actual names passed in, performed at the parser level. I don't mean to imply checking of the type of a variable.

        This covers 90% of the times you need to pass named parameters (the other 10% being where you might not know the names you need to pass ahead of time - in which case you construct your API so you can pass a hash instead), and would
        • Ah, I see. Myself and others have suggested that as a feature for Ruby 2.0. Whether or not it's adopted remains to be seen. Given that Ruby 2.0 is vaporware at the moment, it's not much of an issue.

          Will Perl 6 handle this any differently?

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