Intermingling attr_accessor and an initialize method in one class

Question

I see code like:

class Person
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end
end

I understand this allows me to do things like person = Pe

Answer 1

I think you consider initialize as a constructor. To be precise, it is not. The default constructor is the new method on the class, and initialize is called by that method. If you do not define initialize, you can still create an object with new because initialize is not the constructor itself. In that case, the default initialize does nothing. If you do define initialize, then that is called right after the object creation.

The statement @foo = ... and attr_accessor :foo are different. The former assigns a value to the instance variable @foo, whereas the latter lets you access @foo via methods foo and foo=. Without the latter, you can still access @foo by directly describing so.