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Ruby actually went one step beyond: there are no attributes. `attr_reader` just generates a 0-arg method, while `attr_writer` just generates a 1 argument `name=

• masklinn 7y ago
  TBF that's pretty directly inherited from the Smalltalk ancestry: just like Smalltalk, Ruby simply doesn't have public (data) fields. Although it does provide shortcuts for automatically generating accessors which I don't think Smalltalk did / does. Funnily enough, Self opted for the opposite tack of not having private data fields (although it does have readonly and read/write slots), but you can trivially swap "data" slots and "method" slots: http://handbook.selflanguage.org/2017.1/langref.html#construction-of-object-literals http://handbook.selflanguage.org/2017.1/langref.html#constru...
  • scroot 7y ago
    > Although it does provide shortcuts for automatically generating accessors which I don't think Smalltalk did / does. Most Smalltalk browsers do actually offer this capability
    • masklinn 7y ago
      The tooling does provide that yes, as it does in e.g. Java. But Ruby does it without tooling, the feature is a runtime message to the class object.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]