Question

I’m trying to add a property called “enabled?” to a model with both a getter and a setter. However, when I do the following:

def enabled?= value
  # .. logic goes here ..
end

I get syntax error, unexpected '?', expecting '\n' or ';'

What should I be doing instead?

Answer 1

Yes, ruby syntax only allows ? in method names if it’s the last character, so foo?= is not valid. One thing you could do, that would be pretty idiomatic, is to define enabled?, enable and disable (or enable! and disable! if you want to emphasize that they’re mutating methods).

If that doesn’t fit your needs, you can just name the methods enabled? and enabled= and just live with the slight incosistency between the names.