dweebd

Ruby’s attr_accessor is incredibly handy for wiring up your class’s banal getters and setters. If you’re wiring up some simple booleans this way though, wouldn’t you like to get the beauty of Ruby’s method punctuation?

I mean come on, we’re asking a question here.

The old way:

class Doyen
  attr_accessor :recondite
 
  def recondite?
    self.recondite
  end
 
end

Blah… Let’s tidy that up.

class Doyen
  bool_attr_accessor :recondite
end

Now our Doyen no longer has doyen.recondite, but simply doyen.recondite? and no visual clutter.

The implementation is simple:

class Module
  def bool_attr_accessor *args
    args.each do |arg|
      self.instance_eval do
 
        define_method("#{arg}=") do |value|
          instance_variable_set("@#{arg}", !!value)
        end
 
        define_method("#{arg}?") do
          instance_variable_get("@#{arg}")
        end
 
      end
    end
 
  end
end

Originally I used an attr_writer *args to simplify the setters, but I decided that since this function would always return a boolean, it would be better to do the conversion on the setter and let the getter simply return the pre-converted value.