From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2011-04-29T05:22:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Is everything object ?

Josh Cheek wrote in post #995509:
> There are only three _relevant_ things that I can think of right now
> that
> aren't objects. Let us say that a thing is relevant as a nonobject if it
> means you can't manipulate it like an object (ie pass it as an argument,
> store it in a variable, and call methods on it). The first is boolean
> methods like "&&" and "||", the second is keywords like "class", and
> "def",
> the third is variables, which point to objects but are not objects
> themselves, thus cannot be pointed to by other variables.

I think it's reasonable to say that most operators in Ruby are in fact 
syntactic sugar for method calls; so are some other syntactic 
constructions like a[b] and a[b] = c. All these can be invoked 
equivalently using send, e.g.

a.send(:[]=, b, c)

However the assignment operators =, +=, -= etc are *not* mapped to 
method calls, in addition to the short-circuit boolean operators as 
you've already pointed out.

It's perhaps also worth mentioning that literals don't invoke method 
calls; e.g. "foo" and /foo/ can't be intercepted by redefining 
String.new or Regexp.new

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