Do you leave parentheses in or out in Ruby?

ruby coding-style choice
CharlesChipy picture CharlesChipy · Dec 4, 2008 · Viewed 25k times · Source

When possible.. do you leave parentheses in or out in Ruby?

Answer

Jason Navarrete picture Jason Navarrete · Dec 5, 2008

From the Elements of Ruby Style

Ruby allows you to leave out parenthesis, in general, resist this temptation.

Parenthesis make the code easier to follow. General Ruby style is to use them, except in the following cases:

  • Always leave out empty parentheses
  • The parentheses can be left out of a single command that is surrounded by ERb delimiters -- the ERb markers make sure the code is still readable
  • A line that is a single command and a single simple argument can be written without the parenthesis. Personally, I find that I do this less and less, but it's still perfectly readable. I tend not to like single lines in regular ruby code that have multiple arguments and no parentheses.
  • A lot of Ruby-based Domain Specific Languages (such as Rake) don't use parenthesis to preserve a more natural language feel to their statements.

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