Understanding private methods in Ruby

ghz 1years ago ⋅ 6155 views

Question

class Example
 private
 def example_test
  puts 'Hello'
 end
end

e = Example.new
e.example_test

This of course will not work, because we specified explicit receiver - instance of Example (e), and that is against a "private rule".

But I cannot understand, why one cannot do in Ruby this:

class Foo
 def public_m
  self.private_m # <=
 end
 private
 def private_m
  puts 'Hello'
 end
end

Foo.new.public_m

The current object inside public_m method definition (i.e. self) is the instance of Foo. So why it is not allowed? To fix that I have to change self.private_m to just private_m. But why this differ, isn't the self an instance of Foo inside public_m? And who is the receiver of bare-word private_m call? Isn't that self - what actually you omit because, Ruby will do it for you (will call private_m on self)?

I hope I didn't confuse it too much, I am still fresh to Ruby.

EDIT: Thank you for all the answers. Putting them all together I was able (finally) to grok the obvious (and not so obvious for someone, who have never seen things like Ruby): that self itself can be explicit and implicit receiver and that make the difference. So there are two rules, if you want to call a private method: self must be implicit receiver, and that self must be an instance of current class (Example in that case - and that takes place only when self if inside instance method definition, during this method execution). Please correct me if I am wrong.

class Example 

 # self as an explicit receiver (will throw an error)
 def explicit 
  self.some_private_method
 end

 # self as an implicit receiver (will be ok)
 def implicit
  some_private_method
 end

 private

 def some_private_method; end
end

Example.new.implicit

Message for anyone who could find this question during the google trails: this may be helpful - <http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2007/2/23/method-visibility-in- ruby>

Answer

Here's the short and the long of it. What private means in Ruby is a method cannot be called with an explicit receivers, e.g. some_instance.private_method(value). So even though the implicit receiver is self, in your example you explicitly use self so the private methods are not accessible.

Think of it this way, would you expect to be able to call a private method using a variable that you have assigned to an instance of a class? No. Self is a variable so it has to follow the same rules. However when you just call the method inside the instance then it works as expected because you aren't explicitly declaring the receiver.

Ruby being what it is you actually can call private methods using instance_eval:

class Foo
  private
  def bar(value)
    puts "value = #{value}"
  end
end

f = Foo.new
begin
  f.bar("This won't work")
rescue Exception=>e
  puts "That didn't work: #{e}"
end
f.instance_eval{ bar("But this does") }

Hope that's a little more clear.

-- edit --

I'm assuming you knew this will work:

class Foo
 def public_m
  private_m # Removed self.
 end
 private
 def private_m
  puts 'Hello'
 end
end

Foo.new.public_m
#ruby