Ruby Constructors: new or initialize?
I gave a brief explanation of new
and initialize
in Chapter 1. At that stage, you had not examined the differences between Ruby’s class and instance methods and variables, so it was not possible to give a full discussion of how new
and initialize
work together. Because these are such important methods, you’ll look at them in more detail now.
The method responsible for bringing an object into being is called the constructor. In Ruby, the constructor method is called new
. The new
method is a class method that, once it has created an object, will run an instance method named initialize
if such a method exists.
In brief then, the new
method is the constructor, and the initialize
method is used to initialize the ...
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