Anonymous Classes in Ruby
I’m currently watching Dave Thomas’ ‘Ruby Meta-Programming’ screencast from PragProg and he just said something that sorta blew my mind. It both made sense and I hadn’t quite realized that Ruby works this way.
Let’s say you declare a string:
person = "Jennifer"
Then I can also create a method only on person:
def person.job 'programmer' end
And then when I call person.job, it returns ‘programmer’. Pretty cool, right? Apparently Ruby does this by creating an anonymous class. So when I’m looking for methods on person (which is a String), it first checks this anonymous class, then the String class, then Object, then BasicObject. I’m not quite sure of a real-life use case for this, but the idea is pretty neat.
INSTA-UPDATE:
Even cooler: if I define another method (say person.hobby), that will be put into the same anonymous class as person.job. Ruby will not create a new anonymous class for each singleton method; it knows that they should be part of the same class.