The Elements of Style in Ruby #11: Invoking Lambdas/Procs

There are whopping 4 ways to invoke a lambda (or a proc) in Ruby:

lambda.call(arg1, arg2)

lambda[arg1, arg2]

lambda.(arg1, arg2)

# works only with one argument lambdas
lambda === arg

The last option Proc#=== is a special case, that’s quite useful in case expressions, but should never the used directly.

Of the three general purpose Proc methods that are available (it’s actually just one method with two aliases) I’d strongly encourage you to stick withProc#call. The reasons are quite simple:

• lambda[arg] looks like an index access on some data structure and you’d certainly have to analyze the code context to understand what’s going on (especially since the lambda is unlikely to actually be named lambda in actual code ).

• lambda.(arg) is a cute syntactic trick, but it’s really easy to overlook the . and assume that this is a normal method call (which probably was the point when this syntax was introduced). lambdas in Ruby are not real lambdas (they are instances of the Proc class) and we should simply embrace this fact instead of trying to hide it behind awkward syntax.

I value code clarity and readability immensely and I’m not particularly fond of excessive usage of operator overloading. The use of operators for lambda invocations in Ruby represents the ugly side of operator overloading - instead of increasing the readability of the code, the operators actually decrease it.