From: Lennon Day-Reynolds <rcoder@...>
Date: 2004-06-22T07:28:12+09:00
Subject: Re: A question about Class and Object

Sam,

'Object', 'Module', and 'Class' are all components of Ruby's
meta-object protocol, so the relationships between them are a special
case. 'Object.class' returns 'Class', but internally, the Object type
is created in the C code that initializes the object model, before
that model is complete.

In other words, a few core classes must be bootstrapped in the runtime
to avoid circular inheritance relationships. That can make them appear
to violate the usual semantics, but there is really no way aside from
layering a class-based object model on top of a simpler one (such as
simple prototypes) to avoid having certain primitives with special
status and semantics.

Lennon