Best way of emulating enum in Ruby? (part two)

Question

Hello, I'm new to Ruby so forgive me if this is something obvious..

I've made a class like so

class Element
  attr_accessor :type
  :type_integer
  :type_string
end

(this is really just an example, not actual code)

Well, I've read http://stackoverflow.com/questions/75759/enums-in-ruby and I'd prefer to go the Symbols route of having something like enumerations in other languages. I have a problem though, how can I keep my global scope clear while implementing this. What I'm wanting to be able to do is something like

e=Element.new
e.type=Element.type_integer

or something pretty simple and straight forward like that.

Answer 1

Symbols don't do anything to the global (or any other) scope (i.e. no variables or constants or anything else gets defined when you use symbols), so I guess the answer is: just use symbols and the global scope will be kept clear.

If you want to use e.type=Element.type_integer, while still using symbols, you could do:

class Element
  def self.type_integer
    :type_integer
  end
end

Although I fail to see the upside vs. just using e.type = :type_integer directly.