What is the difference between "include module" and "extend module" in Ruby? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What is the difference between include and extend in Ruby?

Given:

module my_module   def foo     ...   end end 

Question 1

What is the difference between:

class A   include my_module end 

and

class A   extend my_module end 

Question 2

Will foo be considered an instance method or a class method ? In other words, is this equivalent to:

class A   def foo     ...   end end 

or to:

class A   def self.foo     ...   end end 

?

Answer 1

I wrote a blog posting about this a long time ago here.

When you're "including" a module, the module is included as if the methods were defined at the class that's including them, you could say that it's copying the methods to the including class.

When you're "extending" a module, you're saying "add the methods of this module to this specific instance". When you're inside a class definition and say "extend" the "instance" is the class object itself, but you could also do something like this (as in my blog post above):

module MyModule   def foo     puts "foo called"   end end  class A end  object = A.new object.extend MyModule  object.foo #prints "foo called"     

So, it's not exactly a class method, but a method to the "instance" which you called "extend". As you're doing it inside a class definition and the instance in there is the class itself, it "looks like" a class method.