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I patched ruby 1.8.4 to gather some statistics regarding naming conventions, as far as identifiers are concerned. My local build will now emit such information at parse time as follows:

 $ ruby -t -c -e "def a(x); c = x.size; def x.bar; 1 end; c + 1 end"
 [tokinfo] method def: a
 [tokinfo] tIDENTIFIER assignment for lvar: c
 [tokinfo] singleton method def: bar
 Syntax OK

These are the statistics for Ruby 1.8.4's stdlib:

I just added some code to the parser and some support functions in order to capture:

• uses of symbols (symbol)
• method definitions (method)
• singleton method definitions in the form def object.meth (smethod)
• class/module names (cname)
• plain constant names (constant)
• block-local variables assigned to inside a nested block (dvar)
• block-local variables (dvar_curr)
• local variables (lvar)
• instance variables (ivar)
• global variables (gvar)
• class variables (cvar)

The difference between dvar and dvar_curr is fairly subtle; in the following example, x is a dvar_curr:

%w[a b c].each{|x| puts x * 2}

"curr" means that the variable was defined in the current block.

When a block reuses a variable defined in an enclosing block, it is considered a dvar:

%w[aasdad dfdsb sdfsfc].map do |x|
  max = 0
  x.each_byte{|b| max = b if b > max }
  max
end

Here max, as seen from the block passed to each_byte, is a dvar.

Comparison across Ruby versions