Date::today not defined?

Question

Why are only some methods of the Date class loaded without an explicit:

require \'date\'

line?

For example:

irb(mai         


        

Answer 1

The Date class you are seeing is defined in lib/rubygems/specification.rb for compatibility reasons:

# date.rb can't be loaded for `make install` due to miniruby
# Date is needed for old gems that stored #date as Date instead of Time.
class Date; end

It's an empty class definition and it doesn't provide any methods or functionality.

If starting IRB without RubyGems, that Date class is gone:

$ ruby --disable-gems -S irb
irb(main):001:0> Date
NameError: uninitialized constant Date

Update

The empty Date class was removed in RubyGems 2.4.0:

• RubyGems no longer defines an empty Date class. Pull Request #948 by Benoit Daloze.

Answer 2

Complementing @Stefan answer:

Please note that This has been removed, in later version of rubygems.

• Changelog here
• Merge Request here