Would you really type:

   class Foo
     attr_accessor( :bar )
   end

   f = Foo.new()
   f.bar=( 12 )
   puts( f.bar() )

One of the greatest reasons for omitting parentheses is that the
syntactic sugar allows you to write code that *looks* like you're
assigning values to properties and reading those properties, when in
reality you're calling methods.

   f.bar = 12
   puts( f.bar )