Question

It’s been a while since I last did Ruby programming — looking at somebody else’s code, I see the @ sigil in a function (not a method — external to any class definition), which I understood to be scoped to instance members.

Is the module the implied self in functions?

Answer 1

In a top-level function (still a method really), you’re in a slightly strange place: a global “main” space (see the prompt when you run irb, or try looking at self inside such a function), but also these functions are defined as private methods inside the Object class.

$ cat foo
def foo
  p self
  p self.class
  puts 'foo'
end

foo
Object.foo

$ ruby foo
main
Object
foo
foo:8: private method `foo' called for Object:Class (NoMethodError)
$ 

You can sneak around this by explicitly declaring these methods public, but I’m not sure I like this! Curiously, if you define a top-level method inside irb, then you can call it via the class method Object#foo without declaring it public.

So this is a kind of an “implied main namespace hacked onto Object (but shhh don’t tell anyone)”. @foo defined inside a top-level function is available inside Object, as a plain old attribute. Sort of. If your top-level method set @foo and you call it without scoping then it is declared in the eigen-like main namespace, but if you call the class method via Object then @foo appears in the space of Object.

Another example:

public
def set_foo
  @foo = 'foo'
end

def get_foo
  @foo
end

def Object.get_foo_again
  @foo
end

set_foo
p get_foo
p Object.get_foo_again

Object.set_foo
p Object.get_foo_again

gives

"foo"  # @foo set in main
nil    # @foo nil in Object  
"foo"  # @foo in Object

The converse also applies.