Ruby Syntax - One::Two

Ruby
1

I’m a newcomer to ruby and there’s this little something I don’t
really understand:

class One::Two
…
end

Class One::Three
…
end

On this example, what does “::” mean? If understand correctly it’s
just sort of a naming convention to imply that both the Two and Three
classes belong to the same “group”, as in Net::HTTP and Net::FTP.
So, in essence Two and Three are completely unrelated, and I’d not
even need to have a class named One for it to work, is that right?

If not, please tell me, what exactly is the purpose of “::” on class
names?

Thanks

2

Alle venerdì 16 febbraio 2007, [email protected] ha scritto:

On this example, what does “::” mean? If understand correctly it’s
just sort of a naming convention to imply that both the Two and Three
classes belong to the same “group”, as in Net::HTTP and Net::FTP.
So, in essence Two and Three are completely unrelated, and I’d not
even need to have a class named One for it to work, is that right?

If not, please tell me, what exactly is the purpose of “::” on class
names?

Thanks

:: is the scope operator. It is used to access constants defined in a
class or
module. Since classes are constants, when you write class One::Two,
you’re
defining the class Two inside One (where One can be a class or a
module). If
you didn’t define One, the code class One::Two will give you a
NameError,
telling you that the constant One is not initialized:

class One::Two
end
NameError: uninitialized constant One
from (irb):1

Another example of the use of :: is

puts Math::PI, which prints the value of the PI constant

puts Math::PI
3.14159265358979

Since PI belongs to the Math module, I couldn’t have written puts PI. In
fact,
this raises an exception:

puts PI
NameError: uninitialized constant PI
from (irb):5

I hope this helps.

Stefano

3

On Feb 16, 8:26 am, Stefano C. [email protected] wrote:

If not, please tell me, what exactly is the purpose of “::” on class

class One::Two

    from (irb):5

I hope this helps.

Stefano

I understand now, I didn’t realize “class One::Two” actually defined
the constant Two inside One.
Thank you!