Access variables programmatically by name in Ruby

Question

I\'m not entirely sure if this is possible in Ruby, but hopefully there\'s an easy way to do this. I want to declare a variable and later find out the name of the variable.

Answer 1

You need to re-architect your solution. Even if you could do it (you can't), the question simply doesn't have a reasonable answer.

Imagine a get_name method.

a = 1
get_name(a)

Everyone could probably agree this should return 'a'

b = a
get_name(b)

Should it return 'b', or 'a', or an array containing both?

[b,a].each do |arg|
  get_name(arg)
end

Should it return 'arg', 'b', or 'a' ?

def do_stuff( arg )
  get_name(arg)
do
do_stuff(b)

Should it return 'arg', 'b', or 'a', or maybe the array of all of them? Even if it did return an array, what would the order be and how would I know how to interpret the results?

The answer to all of the questions above is "It depends on the particular thing I want at the time." I'm not sure how you could solve that problem for Ruby.