From: Gary Wright <gwtmp01@...>
Date: 2007-08-08T05:56:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Question - Passing parameters by reference


On Aug 6, 2007, at 8:16 PM, Logan Capaldo wrote:

> this seemed to illustrate it better in my head. Seeing it typed  
> out, it
> doesn't look so insightful. I guess what I'm trying to say is.  
> don't think
> of literals as ways of referring to objects, think of them as  
> method calls
> that return objects. Or something like that.
>


It is confusing to me to even think about methods returning objects  
unless
you are using that as a very specific shorthand for saying that methods
return *references* to objects.  That is the unifying idea that  
helped me
understand how Ruby manipulates data--it is all references and not the
objects themselves.  The objects themselves are almost completely hidden
from the programmer (excluding C extensions) in Ruby.  Everything is a
reference to an object.  At least that is the way I have come to  
understand
things but it means that you have to ditch the idea that Fixnum's and
Symbols (and true, false, nil) are somehow special cases.  In my mind  
they
are not.  The literals :blue, 42, true, false, nil are all references to
particular objects and assignment is the process of binding a  
reference to
a variable.

Of course I'm not talking about the underlying *implementation* that  
Ruby
uses to make this all efficient.  I'm talking about the abstract  
semantics
of Ruby's object model.

Gary Wright