Personally I agree with the proposal, largely because I love methods that end with a trailing '?' - I think that was
a good language choice matz made to indicate query-like methods via ?.
Such as:
if game_over?
notify_the_user_that_the_game_is_over
end
I kind of have stopped using attr* methods though, in part because I could not use them for trailing '?', but
in part also because I seem to become lazier whenever I use attr methods. Additionally some methods need to
do some clean-up and sanitization steps in certain classes, and the attr-methods only really are super-simple,
not allowing for extra actions here - e. g. just to be used as setters and getters.
I do seem to remember that there was a reason given as to why no trailing '?' method exists for the attr-family
of methods. I think matz mentioned this once on the bugtracker, but I forgot the explanation. (You may have
hinted to this in your own proposal above, but I can not find matz' comment right now.)
You can workaround this by using attr_reader to create the optimized method, alias_method to give it the
nice active? name, and then remove_method to delete the original non-? name:
There are many workarounds. I simply use the "def" variant. :P
def age?
@age
end; alias age age?
(Although for larger classes, I shifted towards using a Hash that keeps track of all instance variables
instead. I found that once you have like ~20 different instance variables, a Hash seems easier to understand
than individual instance variables.)
Note that I think your proposal has not been clear in regards to what attr_reader would do.
Are these two separate methods or not? Consider this:
attr_reader :foobar
attr_reader :foobar?
Both would query over @foobar, right? But are these the same methods or different? e. g. when
someone undefines/removes them, is the other one removed or not? That should also be clarified
in the proposal IMO, just to make it instantly clear to the dev team what is meant exactly.