When learning Ruby, one of the interesting language features that I came across was the calling of methods within class definitions. When a class has finished loading, the method calls that exist within the class are executed, one after another. The purpose of these method calls is generally to make modifications to the class and change its functionality, although this isn’t necessarily always the case. One of the most common examples of this feature is the attr_accessor method. The ability to modify a class via code execution is very powerful, although somewhat surprising to the new Ruby developer.

Let’s take a look at how this works.

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