When you hear the word a constant, what comes to mind? What would you tell someone what a constant is, in a programming language?

A constant is a variable whose value cannot be changed once assigned. Right? This is true for most programming languages, in Ruby there is more to the story of constants.

First, you may be surprised to see the following:

>> FUN_CONSTANT = "hello"
=> "hello"
>> FUN_CONSTANT = "bye"
(irb):66: warning: already initialized constant FUN_CONSTANT
(irb):65: warning: previous definition of FUN_CONSTANT was here            
=> "bye"                                                                   
>> FUN_CONSTANT
=> "bye"

The Ruby interpreter does not enforce the ‘constantcy’ of constants. The compile issues a warning when you try to reassign a constant but the reassignment still works. (there is a method Object#freeze in ruby. Calling FOO = "hello".freeze will make it so that we get a runtime error if we try to modify the value “hello”. However, the constant FOO can still be reassigned to a totally different value. It is a bit nuanced, I will cover freeze in a later post)

An aside: about some Ruby conventions. Any variable that begins with a capital letter is a constant. Class names and Module names are constants also. The convention is to use snake_case with capital letters for regular constants LIKE_THIS. Class and Modules names are written in PascalCase case LikeThis.

So if we can change the value of a constant, how is a constant different from a variable?

constants are different from variables in their scope or where in the program they’re visible.

Unlike variables that are visible locally, constants have the visibility of global variables in a sense. The file system on your computer is a good analogy for developing an intuitive sense for the scope of constants in Ruby.

You might be surprised to learn that a Ruby constant is actually very similar to a variable - to the extent that you can change the value of a constant… If you can change the value of a constant how is a constant different from a variable? The one important difference has to do with their scope. The scope of constants follows its own special rules. - Metaprogramming Ruby 2

We can visualize all constants in a program to be arranged in a tree like structure similar to a file system. Where modules (and classes) can be thought of as directories and regular constants can be thought of as files.

?> module MyModule
?>   FUN_CONSTANT = "ruby is fun"
?>   class MyClass
?>     FUN_CONSTANT = "this is NOT the same constant as above"
?>   end
>> end

>> MyModule::FUN_CONSTANT
=> "ruby is fun"
>> MyModule::MyClass::FUN_CONSTANT
=> "this is NOT the same constant as above"

We can have multiple constants with the same name because they are at different ‘levels’ or ‘paths’. Similar to a file system, where we know we can have multiple files with the same name as long as they live in different directories.

constants are uniquely identified by their paths.

If we are sitting deep inside a tree of modules and classes, we can use leading :: to access an outer, root-level constants. Like this:

>> MY_CONSTANT = "a root-level constant"

?> module Hello
?>   MY_CONSTANT = "a constant inside Hello"
?>   MY_CONSTANT    # => "a constant inside Hello"
?>   ::MY_CONSTANT  # => "a root-level constant"
>> end

>> ::MY_CONSTANT
=> "a root-level constant"
>> Object::MY_CONSTANT
=> "a root-level constant"

Note that there is not actually a “global scope” for constants. Root level constants are defined (and looked up) within the Object class. The expression ::MY_CONSTANT is just a shorthand for Object::MY_CONSTANT.

What if we want to know all the constants that are currently in scope? We can use an instance method of Module class Module#constants to get that list. (In the file system analogy, this is like ls or dir)

There is also a class method of Module with the same name (confusingly). We can call Module.constants and that will returns all the top-level constants in the current program. This will include class names too. When I did Module.constants in irb it returned a couple dozen constants.

One last useful method, before we wrap up! What if we want to know the current path in the tree? Module.nesting tells us that. (In the file system analogy, this is like typing pwd at your command prompt).

>> Module.nesting
=> []
?> module M
?>   class C
?>     module M2
?>       Module.nesting
?>     end
?>   end
>> end
=> [M::C::M2, M::C, M]

Module.nesting answers the question where am I? It’s an array that goes all the way up the hierarchy.

I hope the 5 minutes you spent reading about how constants work in Ruby, will save you from surprises in the future!