From: Martin Ankerl <martin.ankerl@...>
Date: 2005-03-21T23:39:50+09:00
Subject: Re: [EVALUATION] - E03 - jamLang Evaluation Case Applied to Ruby

>> You can think of the whole file as "main". The code will be read from
>> top to bottom.
[...]
> This means that ruby is _not_ strictly Object Oriented.

Ruby is not strictly OO, but not for the reason you think. Here is a 
nice explenation why:
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/classes.html#S3

> And this means that I can drop the "if __FILE__ [...]" construct.

__FILE__ is the name of the current source file.
$0 is the name of the top-level ruby program being executed.

So this construct just checks if this the source file is the file that 
is executed directly with e.g. 'ruby talker.rb', and only if this is the 
case, the codeblock will be executed.


martinus