From: pharrington <xenogenesis@...>
Date: 2009-11-19T08:50:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Inheriting from Object

On Nov 18, 6:43 pm, pharrington <xenogene...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 18, 6:16 pm, Mike Stephens <rub...@recitel.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > I'm just working through Ruby Visual Quickstart Guide by Larry Ullman,
> > which is quite an enjoyable book (so far). In it he has this :
>
> > "Methods defined outside of any class ... are automatically defined as
> > part of the Object class. Because every class automatically inherits
> > from the Object class, these methods are therefore inherited by every
> > class."
>
> > When I tried this, it didn't work (ie write some methods and then
> > declare a class and try and use those methods on new members of that
> > class) . Ruby issues an error message - "private error
> > called...(nomethoderror)".
>
> > I lodged a question on Larry's web site, and to his credit he replied in
> > due course. He said "I'm sorry: what I wrote probably isn't clear there.
> > Every object inherits the methods in the original Object, but they don't
> > inherit methods created in situations like this. Sorry for the
> > confusion!"
>
> > It raises an interesting question. When you write methods outside of a
> > specific class block, you are in the envelope of some top level class,
> > so why aren't these methods added?
> > --
> > Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
> xeno@Clover:~/projects$ ruby -e "puts class << self; self;
> end.inspect"
> #<Class:#<Object:0x7f3d0edf6298>>
>
> This says to me that top level is instance of class Object (which
> mixes in Kernel), so methods defined in top level will be added to
> that object's singleton class, not the base Object class. However this
> is just a guess inspired by your question; I await the actual answer
> to this.

Ignore all this: I don't understand Ruby.