What is the best way to create alias to attributes in Ruby?

Question

What is the best way to create an alias to a instance atribute in Ruby (I\'m not using rails or any ruby gem, just, Ruby).
For example given the class below, how can I c

Answer 1

add

alias :name :student_name    # not wrong, only for getter
alias :name= :student_name=  # add this for setter
alias :name? :student_name?  # add this for boolean

Answer 2

As John points out, you need to alias both the reader and the writer. This being Ruby, it's quite easy to define your own alias method to handle this for you.

class Module
  def alias_attr(new_attr, original)
    alias_method(new_attr, original) if method_defined? original
    new_writer = "#{new_attr}="
    original_writer = "#{original}="
    alias_method(new_writer, original_writer) if method_defined? original_writer
  end
end

Answer 3

For Rails

alias_attribute new_name, old_name

Source http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/AttributeMethods/ClassMethods.html#method-i-alias_attribute

Use case: When you, most likely, want to change the attribute name without changing schema and without breaking existing functionality