Ruby Definition of Self

Question

I was reading a Ruby book and came across this definition of the pseudo-variable self:

self - receiver object of the current method

Answer 1

self - receiver object of the current method

"Method calling" in Ruby is accomplished through a message-sending mechanism. So

some_object.some_method(args)

is a shorthand for

some_object.send(:some_method, args)

I think this is what the quote is referring to: "self" is the object to which the message (or method) has been sent: the receiver of the current method.

The whole message-sending thing is part of what makes Ruby so dynamic. It makes it easy for an object to define method_missing for messages it doesn't currently handle and decide what to do with them. Rails uses this a lot: ActiveRecord, for example has the "find_by..." syntax, which figures out what's wanted from the name of the method called/sent.