TIL: alias in Ruby

Today I learned (learnt?) about the alias keyword in Ruby. I'm not sure how I've gone this long working with ruby without hearing about it but better late than never.

If this is also your first time hearing about alias, let me give you a short intro.

Ruby is a very expressive language, it lets you to write code that looks like plain english. Keeping with that trend it's not uncommon for me to do something like this in a class:

class Todo  attr_accessor :name, :complete  def initialize(name)    @name = name    @complete = false  end  def done?    complete  end  def mark_complete=(arg)    complete=(arg)  endend

Ok, I wouldn't actually do that but I'm just illustrating a point.

This works just fine and lets us keep writing our plain english-like syntax

my_todo = Todo.new('Learn about the alias keyword')my_todo.done? # => falsemy_todo.mark_complete = truemy_todo.done? # => true

But, just like most things in Ruby, there is a shorter and better(?) way to do this.

Enter the alias keyword:

class Todo  attr_accessor :name, :complete  def initialize(name)    @name = name    @complete = false  end  alias done? complete  alias mark_complete= complete=end

So much shorter and cleaner. I also think it's just as expressive as (if not more than) the original example. And it still works as expected:

my_todo = Todo.new('Learn about the alias keyword')my_todo.done? # => falsemy_todo.mark_complete = truemy_todo.done? # => true

I found the alias keyword to be pretty great and definitely something I'm going to start using in the future.

How about you? What do you think about the alias keyword in Ruby?