From: Phrogz Date: 2006-09-20T23:10:08+09:00 Subject: Re: the point of omitting parentheses Would you really type: class Foo attr_accessor( :bar ) end f = Foo.new() f.bar=( 12 ) puts( f.bar() ) One of the greatest reasons for omitting parentheses is that the syntactic sugar allows you to write code that *looks* like you're assigning values to properties and reading those properties, when in reality you're calling methods. f.bar = 12 puts( f.bar )