Issue #5825 has been updated by Thomas Sawyer. I think it's really not such a good idea. Often you'll just end up having to redo it anyway when you finally decide to coerce and/or validate arguments to make your code more robust, e,g, def initialize(@name, @age, @location); end Becomes def initialize(name, age, location) @name = name.to_s @age = age.to_i @location = Location.new(location) end Might as well write it out from the get-go in preparation. ---------------------------------------- Feature #5825: Sweet instance var assignment in the object initializer https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/5825 Author: Gosha Arinich Status: Assigned Priority: Normal Assignee: Yukihiro Matsumoto Category: Target version: 2.0.0 I'm very excited about this feature in CoffeeScript, and think it might be a nice-to-have thing in Ruby 2.0. That's how I think it would look like: `class Me def initialize(@name, @age, @location); end end` So we can declare @variables in the initializer method parameters definition to avoid assigning instance variables from method arguments by hand, like: `class Me def initialize(name, age, location) @name = name @age = age @location = location end end` Want to hear what do you guys think, does that feature worth being included in 2.0? -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/