This may not be a bug. It may be my misinterpretation of the feature.
When using UnboundMethod#owner on a class that was created with Class.new(SomeBaseClass), the owner is reported as the SomeBaseClass rather than the new class.
This was a surprising outcome, since I presumed that the owner method would point to the class rather than the class's base class.
Example:
class SomeClass
def some_method
end
end
C = Class.new(SomeClass)
m = C.instance_method(:some_method)
pp m.owner
# => SomeClass
# I would have expected the owner to be C
Yes, this behavior is expected. Changing it would not be backwards compatible.
I think owner in this case means the entity under which the method is originally defined.
Perhaps the documentation can be improved to reflect this.
(Or the other documentation site; I just happen to find the above
more readily via a quick google search.)
On a side note, perhaps the name is not ideal, since I can see why
sbellware may be surprised - UnboundMethod implies to me a method
not attached to anywhere, so I was a bit surprised to see that it
still has a pointer to the original class from where it was created
from. Although I understand that this may be useful; it just seems
a bit peculiar to me ... perhaps it is a MostlyUnboundMethod. :P
Indeed, that's why I was surprised. I wasn't expecting owner to be a pointer to a class that I wasn't working with.
To correct the code I was working on, I now pass around both the UnboundMethod instance as well as the class, and ignore the owner method entirely.
I guess what also throws me, from a usability perspective, is that owner seems asymmetrical with Method#receiver, where Method#receiver is a pointer to the de facto instance that the method is from. I appreciate that this is largely immaterial due to the difference between objects and classes, but just a bit of background on what was informing my biases at the time.
Ideally, it might have been nice to have a method named implementer on UnboundMethod that does what owner does, and have owner reflect some symmetry with Method#receiver. Just a thought.
The documentation for owner states: Returns the class or module that defines the method.. The example given in the documentation shows method being called on a Range instance, but having an owner of Enumerable. So I don't think documentation updates are necessary, and this can be closed.
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