Quoteing jamesUNDERBARb / neurogami.com, on Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 04:26:26AM +0900:
> class Foo
>   attr_reader :bar
> end
> f = Foo.new
> methods = f.methods - Object.methods
> p methods  # ["bar"]
> 
> Ruby seems to think I've defined a method.

> If it's a method, why not document it as a method?

By this definition, there is no such thing as an attribute, only
methods.

Ruby has a syntactic short-cut for defining these kinds of methods.

rdoc has a documentation convention of documenting methods defined using
this short-cut differently from other methods.

Sam