From: Pierre-Charles David <pcdavid@...>
Date: 2007-07-02T20:43:23+09:00
Subject: Re: why 1.hour doesn't work?

2007/7/2, Kenneth <summercoolness@gmail.com>:
> this is a newbie question:
>
> so if it is in Ruby on Rails, then 1.hour   and  1.hour.from_now  both
> work....
> now then, how come in irb, they both don't work?

They're not part of the core language or even the standard library,
but added by Rails. Ruby's classes are open, so libraries can add new
methods even to core classes (in this cas Numeric).

If you want to uses these methods outside of Rails, you need to load
the part of Rails which contributes them (in this case ActiveSupport):

% irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
=> false
irb(main):002:0> require 'active_support'
=> true
irb(main):003:0> 1.hour
=> 3600

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