Monkey patch in Fixnum class

Ruby
1

Hi, I’m kinda new to ruby so there are some things which I’m not sure
which is the best approach.

Right now I’m needing a factorial function, and it doesn’t exists in
Fixnum class. So I thought about monkey patching this class and adding
the factorial method there.

The problem is that I read that monkey patching isn’t a very recommended
thing to do.

Does monkey patching in this case makes sense? Which would be a better
approach than that. And I’m using rails 4, so where should the monkey
patching code go?

Thanks

2

This works:

class Fixnum

def factorial
i = self
return 1 if i <= 1
tot = i
until i <= 1 do
i = i - 1
tot = tot * i
end
return tot
end

end

puts 5.factorial

Just be sure that the class code appears first.