From: timsuth@... (Tim Sutherland)
Date: 2004-06-19T17:28:20+09:00
Subject: Re: a newbie question about main, Object...

In article <871xkcdx44.fsf@optushome.com.au>, George Ogata wrote:
>Kevin Bullock <kbullock@ringworld.org> writes:
>
>> Just some random thoughts I had. Seems like I may have seen this 
>> before... is this an established idiom?
>
>There was a time when toplevel defs were *private* instance methods of
>Object.  The pickaxe says this anyway.  I see nothing in the
>Changelogs about any intentional change, so my guess is it's a bug.
>Gurus?

They still are. This was just an irb thing.

$ cat > foo.rb
def hello
  puts("Hello World")
end

"blah".hello
^D
$ ruby foo.rb
foo.rb:5: private method `hello' called for "blah":String (NoMethodError)

But in irb

irb(main):001:0> def hello
irb(main):002:1>   puts("Hello World")
irb(main):003:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):004:0> "blah".hello
Hello World
=> nil