From: Tom Cloyd <tomcloyd@...>
Date: 2009-01-04T22:48:40+09:00
Subject: Re: VERY simple question about "?"

Yaser Sulaiman wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 3:34 PM, F. Senault <fred@lacave.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> If you have the pickaxe book, it's documented in the "Integer and
>> Floating-Point Numbers" section (page 304 and 305 of my PDF edition).
>>
>>     
>
> And if you don't have the book, you can read that section[1] in the online
> version.
>
> Regards,
> Yaser
>
> [1]: http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/pickaxe/html/language.html#UC
>
>   
Thanks, guys.

I guess what confused me is that I bring to Ruby the notion that if a 
symbol causes something to happen, as "?" clearly does in my example (it 
produces the integer code for a character), its' an operator or method. 
I'm not unfamiliar with linguistics. I don't see the equivalence between 
a string delimiter, or a character that signals the beginning of a 
symbol, and a symbol that is actually productive of something. Makes no 
sense to me at all, in fact. Maybe I'm failing to grasp some 
transformative concept which changes how things work in the Ruby world.

Seeing operators as methods makes some real sense, on the other hand. 
"=" produces something out of what it's given. It doesn't just change 
meaning, which is all that happens with quotes or ":". That's the 
distinction I'm seeing, and it seems valid.

I'll keep thinking about it.

Quite apart from this is the strange matter of how difficult it is to 
find a simple, complete table of Ruby operators. I've basically given up 
on that.

Thanks for the Pickaxe reference - I found it on PDF p. 332 of my PDF 
version of the 2nd ed. I'd never seen that page.

t.

-- 

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