Serabe / pedant

Pedant: Enforcing return values... annoying yet handy!

Author

Jared Kuolt ([e-mail])

Copyright

Copyright © 2009 Jared Kuolt

License

MIT License

Pedant¶ ↑

Enforce return values by type and with user-defined guards.

Installation¶ ↑

sudo gem install pedant

Usage¶ ↑

In defining your classes, you can define allowable return values for your methods by type and with user-defined guards. See how the returns method is used in the following class definition:

require 'rubygems'
require 'pedant'

class Foo

  include Pedant::Returns

  def integer_only
    100
  end
  # We define that the method may *only* return an Integer
  returns(:integer_only, Integer)

  def integer_or_nil
    nil
  end
  # This method can return either an Integer or NilClass
  returns(:integer_or_nil, Integer, NilClass)

  def small_integer
    10
  end
  # This method will raise unless it returns an Integer less than 127
  returns(:small_integer, Integer) {|return_value| return_value < 127 }

  # We can do the same for class methods
  class << self
    def string_or_symbol
      :foo
    end
    returns(:string_or_symbol, String, Symbol)
  end
end

If the type doesn’t match, Pedant::TypeError will be raised. If the user guard does not evaluate to true, Pedant::GuardError will be raised.

Because this code can be destructive, especially in production, it is advised to use Pedant in development and staging environments. To do this, include Pedant::Dummy instead of Pedant::Returns. Pedant::Dummy defines the returns method to do nothing and will no longer get in the way:

if environment == :production
  include Pedant::Dummy
else
  include Pedant::Returns
end