From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2004-06-23T14:33:10+09:00
Subject: Re: A question about Class and Object

Sam Sungshik Kong <ssk@chol.nospam.net> wrote:
> 
> I think what bothers me is terminologies.
> Class is an object and Object is class.
> It's pretty recursive.
> It would be better if we have different terms for each.

> It would be better if we have different terms for each.

Okay, try this. *Everything* in ruby is an object. There are certain
kinds of objects that are templates for creating other objects, we call
those classes. These classes form an inheritance hierarchy, at the base
of which is a common template for creating any object, and this is the
Object class. 

Now, since these templates are themselves objects, they need to be
created via a template too. This template is the Class class. It is a
class, since it is a template for creating objects (template objects in
this case), and it is an object since the templates themselves are just
objects. And conceptually it *is* recursive, since Class is both a
template for creating class objects and a class object itself, but
that's not a problem at the language level (it needs some bootstrapping
at the *implementation* level - see
http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/104332 for an excellent description of
this).

martin