How are singleton methods useful? [closed]

Question

I am pretty new to Ruby and have learned it syntax along with singleton methods. I understand how to create and use them. But why use them?

Can someone give me a few real world cases where using singleton methods are helpful?

Thank You

Answer 1

Maybe you want to do some debugging? Say you have a collection of objects, and you know one of them acts up while being iterated over alongside it's siblings... so you modify a problematic method to wrap it in some logging / tracing code that saves you having to read pages of logging statements for the 100 other items.

That's at least one contrived example I can think of.

Answer 2

• http://www.rubyist.net/~slagell/ruby/singletonmethods.html
• http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/86169 ;
• http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2006/09/ruby-singleton-class.html

Singleton methods: It is often useful to be able to define special behavior for an individual object.