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Ruby Ruby Booleans Build a Simple Todo List Program Part 2: Todo Item Methods

Posted by Nicole Archambault
Nicole Archambault
27,853 Points

Why no attr_writer for :complete?

I was expecting that we would be creating an attr_writer :complete for the @complete instance variable, following up from a previous course example where we did this with @title. My understanding was that even though it wasn't an attribute being passed in, that it would require this since there is a method created to change the status of @complete to true later on.

Is this not the case? If not, is it because we're not passing it in as an argument in initialize, but rather setting it by default?

Thanks in advance! :)

1 Answer

Taylor Boudreau
Taylor Boudreau
7,285 Points
Taylor Boudreau
Taylor Boudreau
7,285 Points

Hi there Nicole,

Super late response here, but this question definitely got me thinking about how the attr methods work.

My understanding, in this case as you're never actually writing or reading complete as it's set within the methods in the class. If you wanted to be a little more free wheeling and let the user set the "completeness" of the item, ("completish", "Partially done", "maybe tomorrow", "totally finished"), then you'd need to add an attr_writer for complete, but you'd lose the consistency gained with a simple boolean.

Hope this helps!

Taylor