From: Thomas Wieczorek <wieczo.yo@...>
Date: 2008-03-06T23:12:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Basics / define met;hod

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Chinna Karuppan
<chinnakaruppan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>  I am new to Ruby and This is a very basic question.when I type p self in
>  irb it gives me 'main'.
>

I can't say much to the details, how irb is implemented, but you can
overwrite what "p object" returns, when you overwrite the inspect()
method:
class FooBar
end
p FooBar.new #=> #<FooBar:0x2aa50f8>

class FooBar
  def inspect
    "I am FooBar"
  end
end
p FooBar.new #=> I am FooBar

>  when I say class what is happening in the backend.since within a class
>  end I am able to call define_method which is a private method and should
>  never be available to anybody and another intersting thing is it is not
>  accessible outside of the
>  class.

You can use the send method to call private methods in Ruby 1.8.6, I
am not sure if it works in 1.9
class Baz
private
def hello; "HELLO!"; end
end

Baz.new.send(:hello) #=> "HELLO!"