From: Chih-Chao Lam <chao@...>
Date: 2006-08-26T03:53:26+09:00
Subject: What does *var mean?

Apologies for a newbie ruby question:

I know an asterisk can precede a parameter in the argument list of a  
method definition as in

def varargs(arg1, *rest)

But looking at the source code of Hpricot, I see that you can precede  
an asterisk before any variable. Is there a formal definition for the  
use of this operator?

irb(main):001:0> *d = 3
=> [3]
irb(main):002:0> d
=> [3]
irb(main):003:0> d == [*d]
=> true
irb(main):004:0> *d
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb):4: parse error, unexpected '\n', expecting '='
         from (irb):4

Thanks,
chao