I just started out using IronRuby (but the behaviour seems consistent when I tested it in plain Ruby) for a DSL in my .NET application - and as part of this I'm defining methods to be called from the DSL via define_method.

However, I've run into an issue regarding optional parens when calling methods starting with an uppercase letter.

Given the following program:

class DemoClass
    define_method :test do puts "output from test" end
    define_method :Test do puts "output from Test" end

    def run
        puts "Calling 'test'"
        test()
        puts "Calling 'test'"
        test
        puts "Calling 'Test()'"
        Test()
        puts "Calling 'Test'"
        Test
    end
end

demo = DemoClass.new
demo.run

Running this code in a console (using plain ruby) yields the following output:

ruby .\test.rb
Calling 'test'
output from test
Calling 'test'
output from test
Calling 'Test()'
output from Test
Calling 'Test'
./test.rb:13:in `run': uninitialized constant DemoClass::Test (NameError)
    from ./test.rb:19:in `<main>'

I realize that the Ruby convention is that constants start with an uppercase letter and that the general naming convention for methods in Ruby is lowercase. But the parens are really killing my DSL syntax at the moment.

Is there any way around this issue?