The Ruby Programming Language

Method Lookup

When Ruby evaluates a method invocation expression, it must first figure out which method is to be invoked. The process for doing this is called method lookup or method name resolution. For the method invocation expression o.m, Ruby performs name resolution with the following steps:

1. First, it checks the eigenclass of o for singleton methods named m.

2. If no method m is found in the eigenclass, Ruby searches the class of o for an instance method named m.

3. If no method m is found in the class, Ruby searches the instance methods of any modules included by the class of o. If that class includes more than one module, then they are searched in the reverse of the order in which they were included. That is, the most recently included module is searched first.

4. If no instance method m is found in the class of o or in its modules, then the search moves up the inheritance hierarchy to the superclass. Steps 2 and 3 are repeated for each class in the inheritance hierarchy until each ancestor class and its included modules have been searched.

5. If no method named m is found after completing the search, then a method named method_missing is invoked instead. In order to find an appropriate definition of this method, the name resolution algorithm starts over at step 1. The Kernel module provides a default implementation of method_missing, so this second pass of name resolution is guaranteed to succeed. The method_missing method is covered in more detail in Handling Undefined Methods.

Let’s consider ...