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Attribute Readers

Attribute Readers

This lesson explains the attribute readers and how they are related to instance variables.

Asking for information

Remember how we initially said that people have the ability to remember their name, and tell it, when asked?

We’ve already implemented the first part of this. Our person instance now knows her name “Ada”.

Let’s look at the second part. You also remember that methods are either questions or commands. We want to add a method that implements answering the question “What’s your name?”.

And it is as simple as this:

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class Person
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end
  def name
    @name
  end
end

Before we discuss what this does, let’s look at how we can use our new method. We can now call the method on the person object, like this:

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person = Person.new("Ada")
puts person.name

So this prints the name Ada, and that’s what we want: we ...

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