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Arguments and Parentheses

Arguments and Parentheses

This lesson discusses the use of parentheses when passing arguments to the methods.

If you have read carefully, you may have noticed that we said about the code puts 5 that puts is a method call. And then later we’ve enclosed the value 3 in parentheses when calling the method: add_two(3).

That’s right:

💡 In Ruby, when you define or call (execute, use) a method, you can omit the parentheses.

So these lines mean exactly the same:

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puts "Hello!"
puts("Hello!")

And so do these:

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puts add_two 2
puts add_two(2)

And all of these:

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puts add_two 2
puts add_two(2)
puts(add_two 2)
puts(add_two(2))

When do you use parentheses, and when do you omit them?

There is no clear rule about this, but there are some conventions. For now, you can just stick with the convention we are using at our study groups, which is:

  • Use parentheses for all method calls that take arguments, except for the methods
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