From: Charles Steinman <acharlieblue@...>
Date: 2006-03-14T16:18:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Passing methods around


Greg Buchholz wrote:
> OK.  I'm trying to get aquinted with the terminology.  Would we say
> that operators, methods, and messages aren't first class entities?
> They're second class citizens, like functions in C (you can't create
> new functions in C at runtime, but you can do quite a bit with function
> pointers).  Does that sound about right?

Nah. You're confusing syntax with identity. The token "*" there is not
itself a method -- you can't assign it to a variable or anything. It
just tells Ruby to call a method. But you can dynamically generate
methods, and you can store a method in a variable -- just not with that
syntax.

Actually, Ruby is the opposite of C as far as what you can do at
runtime. Ruby is all about runtime. For instance, when you're defining
a Person class and you write "attr_accessor :shoe_size", you're calling
a method that dynamically creates (at runtime) the methods "shoe_size"
and "shoe_size=" and defines them to get and set (respectively) the
instance variable @shoe_size. Some people have made classes that
actually define methods as they're called.