I somewhat agree with sawa here.
This may still leave the issue over whether one may prefer a single line/method
call, but I believe this may largely depend on the use case more (if there is
one). I can understand it to some extent if a ruby user may wish to avoid using
the ";", I sometimes want to avoid ";" too. In these cases, I typically do as
sawa pointed out, and just use a new line. :)
But I don't have any really strong preferences here either way, also because
I do not think I have actually used private_constant so far (did not seem
to be necessary for me). I did, however had, have lots of use cases in the past
for const_set() (or whatever the name was for setting a constant for a
particular "namespace" ... I always mix it up with set_const() which I think
does not exist :P ), and also removing this. There are quite many use
cases for the latter, more than for private*, I think. But your mileage
may vary.