From: Paul Brannan <paul@...>
Date: 2002-04-10T01:30:15+09:00
Subject: Re: capital method names

When doing name lookups (and no parens are supplied), Ruby first checks
to see if a local variable of that name exists; if not, then it checks
to see if a method of that name exists.  Your example has a local
variable and a method of the same name, so when you don't provide
parens, Ruby only sees the local variable.  To demonstrate:

ruby -e 'a = 1; p a'                #=> 1
ruby -e 'def a; 2; end; p a'        #=> 2
ruby -e 'a = 1; def a; 2; end; p a' #=> 1

Paul