Do you need parenthesis around a Ruby require

Question

In Ruby, is require('my_thing') equivalent to require 'my_thing'? It's just the ruby convention that you don't need to wrap a function's arguments in paranetheses right?

Answer 1

You are right, you don't need them, however, I think you need to know one important thing before deciding to ditch them all-together in your method calls (regarding your question on conventions):

Follow Best Practices

According to the Ruby Style Guide:

Omit parentheses around parameters for methods that are part of an internal DSL (e.g. Rake, Rails, RSpec), methods that have "keyword" status in Ruby (e.g. attr_reader, puts) and attribute access methods. Use parentheses around the arguments of all other method invocations.

Since require has a "keyword" status in Ruby, it's okay to not use parentheses. If, however, you made your own my_require method, then it would be a better idea to use them.

Answer 2

Allowing omission of parentheses around the argument is a language feature, not a convention.

It is a convention to omit parentheses for methods defined on the Kernel module that start with lower case. require is one of them.