Ruby Metaprogramming Examples

But it can be a bit confusing if you don t have a few specific examples.
Ruby metaprogramming examples. When does self change. Imagine that you have a database table for users that have columns such as name and email. Metaprogramming is often presented as a very nebulous and dangerous concept one that is difficult to explain and hard. Ruby metaprogramming one of the most interesting aspects of ruby enables the programming language to achieve an extreme level of expressiveness.
Metaprogramming is the act of writing code that operates on code rather than on data. Self the current default object. 1st review the built in read only variable self. Ruby metaprogramming by example.
You may have read about ruby metaprogramming before. Please refer our accompanying study notes and examples. In ruby the term metaprogramming refers to the dynamic nature of the language which allows you to define and redefine methods and classes at runtime. It is because of this very feature that many gems such as rspec and activerecord can work the way they do.
Self quote from programming ruby 1 9. All of them use some form of metaprogramming. This involves inspecting and modifying a program as it runs using constructs exposed by the language. Let s begin with a basic example.
Add a method named foldl to ruby s native array class. Ruby is an interpreted high level general purpose programming language it was designed and developed in the mid 1990s by yukihiro matz matsumoto in japan. In ruby the term metaprogramming refers to the dynamic nature of the language which allows you to define and redefine methods and classes at runtime. In the example below here are some of the meta changes we re making to the program.
Nov 20 th 2015 10 34 am. For example when a user model is defined in rails with email as an attribute a method called find by email will be generated. Obviously the ruby on rails framework doesn t know what columns that you re going to have for the. Read the following articles.
2nd review singleton. Examples of metaprogramming a basic example. I m going to start with an example from the ruby on rails framework. We re going to look at some popular open source projects using ruby metaprogramming.
Metaprogramming is often presented as a very nebulous and dangerous concept one that is difficult to explain and hard to wrap your head around and thus should be avoided. In this article toptal engineer nikola todorovic demystifies. Metaprogramming is writing programs that write programs. Quote from the ruby object model.