Ruby Conditional-Assignment and Private Methods

Question

From the code below, it appears the ||= operator is being evaluated from outside of the class.

class Foo
  attr_reader :bar

  def baz
    self.         


        

Answer 1

That looks like a bug.

UPDATE: The bug was fixed in trunk, and is slated for back porting to 2.1 and 2.0.

Note that the problem is more general than that, it is broken for all abbreviated assignments, not just conditional abbreviated assignments:

private def foo=(*) end
public  def foo; 0  end

self.foo =  42

self.foo += 42
# private method `foo=' called for main:Object (NoMethodError)

private :foo

self.foo += 42
# private method `foo' called for main:Object (NoMethodError)