There a couple of things going on here. First, variables declared inside the if
block have the same local scope as variables declared at the top level of the method, which is why bar
is available outside the if
. Second, you’re getting that error because bob
is being referenced straight out of the blue. The Ruby interpreter has never seen it and never seen it initialized before. It has, however, seen bar
initialized before, inside the if statement. So when is gets to bar it knows it exists. Combine those two and that’s your answer.