What are Proc Objects?

Notes on the Le Wagon Iteratros & Blocks Storing Blocks in Procs exercise

A Proc Object is an encapsulation of a block of code which can be stored in a variable. In other words you can call them, pass them to other methods and pass them to other proc objects. It differs to yield in the sense that it can be called later as it has stored and remembered the block information. A method that it is called on may also call another method and therfore this block needs to be transferred to the sub method.

To create a Proc Object you can prefix the last argument in a method with &. This will create a Proc Object from the information given in any block passed in.

Here is an example:

def tell(who, &message_blk)
  "#{who}, #{message_blk.call}!"
end

In this method we give it two arguments, who and &message_blk. The & creates a Proc Object meaning that it will now store the infromation of a block passed to it. The method returns a string with who interpolated as well as the block of code which has been called using the .call method.

def tell_mum(&message_blk)
  tell("mum", &message_blk)
end

This second method tell_mum takes one parameter of &message_blk. The method calls the our previous tell method and passes in the two arguments it requires. “mum” and the block. This means that the tell method can recieve and use the block specified in the other method and perform the desired action.

Lets expand on this

def tell_with_proc(who, message_blk)
  "#{who}, #{message_blk.call}!"
end

The message is now passed as a block as has been previously defined and subseqneutly it can return a string by calling .call on message_block.

def tell_mum_with_proc(message_blk)
  tell_with_proc("mum", message_blk)
end

This final method takes the single message_block parameter and calls the tell_with_proc method. It passes in the two required arguments “mum” and the block defined by message_block.