Name Conflicts

Module methods (those methods specifically preceded by the module name) can help protect your code from accidental name conflicts. However, no such protection is given by instance methods within modules. Let’s suppose you have two modules—one called Happy and the other called Sad. They each contain a module method called mood and an instance method called expression.

happy_sad.rb

module Happy
    def Happy.mood        # module method
        return "happy"
    end

    def expression        # instance method
        return "smiling"
    end
end
module Sad
    def Sad.mood          # module method
        return "sad"
    end

    def expression        # instance method
        return "frowning"
    end
end

Now a class, Person, includes both these modules:

class Person
    include Happy
    include Sad
    attr_accessor :mood

    def initialize
        @mood = Happy.mood
    end
end

The initialize method of the Person class needs to set the value of its @mood variable using the mood method from one of the included modules. The fact that they both have a mood method is no problem; being a module method, mood must be preceded by the module name so Happy.mood won’t be confused with Sad.mood.

But both the Happy and Sad modules also contain a method called expression. This is an instance method, and when both the modules are included in the Person class, the expression method can be called without any qualification:

p1 = Person.new
puts(p1.expression)

Which expression method is object p1 using here? It turns out that it uses the method last defined. In the example case, that happens to be the method defined in the Sad module for the simple reason that Sad is included after Happy. So, p1.expression returns “frowning.” If you change the order of inclusion so that Happy is included after Sad, the p1 object will use the version of the expression method defined in the Happy module and will display “smiling.”

Before getting carried away with the possibilities of creating big, complex modules and mixing them into your classes on a regular basis, bear this potential problem in mind: Included instance methods with the same name will “overwrite” one another. The problem may be obvious to spot in my little program here. But it may not be so obvious in a huge application!