Question

I find myself doing the following a lot to define return values from ruby methods:

def foo
  val = (some expression)
  val
end

This always seems a bit contrived. What’s the best practice here?

Answer 1

It is unnecessary to save it to a variable unless (some expression) is heavy and will be called multiple times. In that case you might want to cache it.

I would go with either:

def foo
  (some expression)
end

or for caching:

def foo
  @val ||= (some expression)
end