groovy and ruby equivalents:evaluating in the context of an object

Let’s say you have a class that has a debug method, and you call it repeteadly:

obj.debug("debugstring")
obj.debug(debug_val)
obj.debug(another_debug_val)

You could make this shorter by using the with method. This will evaluate the code inside the block in the context of the object it was called upon:

obj.with {
   debug("debugstring")
   debug(debug_val)
   debug(another_debug_val)
}

This can make your code cleaner and simpler to understand.

Here’s the Ruby equivalent: instance_eval, and a snippet of code showing how to use it:

File.open("some.file") do |file|
   file.instance_eval do
      puts "this goes into the file"
      puts "same as this"
   end
end

By calling instance_eval, the puts method calls become file.puts. Nice, right?