From: "Iñaki Baz Castillo" <ibc@...>
Date: 2008-05-04T02:58:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Why there is not "replace" method for Fixnum?

El Sábado, 3 de Mayo de 2008, Sebastian Hungerecker escribió:
> Iñaki Baz Castillo wrote:
> > But Fixnum has not this method "replace", neither Float.
>
> Consider this:
> a = 5
> b = 5
> a.object_id == b.object_id #=> true
>
> So a and b point to the same object even if there was no "a = b" anywhere.
> That is because in ruby there is only one single instance of any integer,
> so two variables pointing to 5 always point to the same object. This is
> because of performance. As a consequence of this something like 5.replace 6
> would change *all* occurences of 5 to 6 which clearly would not be the
> desired behaviour. So there is no Integer#replace.

Opss, aewsome! I couldn't imagine it.

Thanks a lot for the explanation :)


-- 
Iñaki Baz Castillo