The Ruby Programming Language

Procs and Lambdas

Blocks are syntactic structures in Ruby; they are not objects, and cannot be manipulated as objects. It is possible, however, to create an object that represents a block. Depending on how the object is created, it is called a proc or a lambda. Procs have block-like behavior and lambdas have method-like behavior. Both, however, are instances of class Proc.

The subsections that follow explain:

• How to create Proc objects in both proc and lambda forms

• How to invoke Proc objects

• How to determine how many arguments a Proc expects

• How to determine if two Proc objects are the same

• How procs and lambdas differ from each other

Creating Procs

We’ve already seen one way to create a Proc object: by associating a block with a method that is defined with an ampersand-prefixed block argument. There is nothing preventing such a method from returning the Proc object for use outside the method:

# This method creates a proc from a block
def makeproc(&p)  # Convert associated block to a Proc and store in p
  p               # Return the Proc object
end

With a makeproc method like this defined, we can create a Proc object for ourselves:

adder = makeproc {|x,y| x+y }

The variable adder now refers to a Proc object. Proc objects created in this way are procs, not lambdas. All Proc objects have a call method that, when invoked, runs the code contained by the block from which the proc was created. For example:

sum = adder.call(2,2)  # => 4

In addition to being invoked, Proc objects can be passed to methods, stored in ...