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Ruby Programming
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Specifying Access Control

You specify access levels to methods within class or module definitions using one or more of the three functions public, protected, and private. Each function can be used in two different ways.

If used with no arguments, the three functions set the default access control of subsequently defined methods. This is probably familiar behavior if you're a C++ or Java programmer, where you'd use keywords such as public to achieve the same effect.

class MyClass

      def method1    # default is 'public'         #...       end

  protected          # subsequent methods will be 'protected'

      def method2    # will be 'protected'         #...       end

  private            # subsequent methods will be 'private'

      def method3    # will be 'private'         #...       end

  public             # subsequent methods will be 'public'

      def method4    # and this will be 'public'         #...       end end

Alternatively, you can set access levels of named methods by listing them as arguments to the access control functions.

class MyClass

  def method1   end

  # ... and so on

  public    :method1, :method4   protected :method2   private   :method3 end

A class's initialize method is automatically declared to be private.

It's time for some examples. Perhaps we're modeling an accounting system where every debit has a corresponding credit. Because we want to ensure that no one can break this rule, we'll make the methods that do the debits and credits private, and we'll define our external interface in terms of transactions.

class Accounts

  private

    def debit(account, amount)       account.balance -= amount     end     def credit(account, amount)       account.balance += amount     end

  public

    #...     def transferToSavings(amount)       debit(@checking, amount)       credit(@savings, amount)     end     #... end

Protected access is used when objects need to access the internal state of other objects of the same class. For example, we may want to allow the individual Account objects to compare their raw balances, but may want to hide those balances from the rest of the world (perhaps because we present them in a different form).

class Account
  attr_reader :balance       # accessor method 'balance'

  protected :balance         # and make it protected

  def greaterBalanceThan(other)     return @balance > other.balance   end end

Because the attribute balance is protected, it's available only within Account objects.
Ruby Programming
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  Published under the terms of the Open Publication License Design by Interspire