Confused by #stub vs. #stub!? Consider #stub! deprecated and use #stub. #stub is simply an alias for #stub!. #stub! was defined in the API at a time when RSpec's authors weren't clear on the intention of "bang" methods in Ruby. Quoting David Chelimsky's email on RubyForge:
The original method was stub!, which I will confess to introducing, and for the wrong reasons, due to my misunderstanding of the meaning of ! in ruby methods. I recently added stub (with no !) with no particular fanfare, as I don't intend to remove stub! (at least not any time soon). Right now the docs don't make it clear, so I need to fix that - but I'd say that stub() is the method to use and stub!() is there for backwards compatibility.
The confusion is compound in The RSpec Book (B15.0 printing, July 29, 2010) where there is as single reference to #stub! on page 199.
References:
- David Chelimsky's explanation on RubyForge
- My Submission to the RSpec Book Erratum
- Posting on the RSpec Book forum
