From: "Mark J.Reed" <mreed@...>
Date: 2005-12-16T07:32:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Assigning a block to a variable in Ruby

ajmayo@my-deja.com writes:
>Oddly, there is an inconsistency here

>q = String("abc")

>q = String.new("abc")

>are both legal but

>q = string("abc")

>is not, which you would extrapolate by extension from the Proc/proc
>analogy. (because

>a=Proc {....}

>is not legal.

That's because there's no automatic correlation between the class Proc and the
method proc.  Lowercase proc is just a static method of the Kernel module that
returns a Proc: it's there as a convenience, because "proc" is less typing than
"Proc.new".

There's no corresponding "string" method because you don't need it. 
If the only way to get a String were to type String.new, there would 
undoubtedly be a Kernel.string as well, but since you can just do this:

q = "abc"

it's not required.  You may not like Perl, but one thing Ruby has 
taken from it is the idea that you can overdo orthogonality.