From: Chad Perrin <code@...>
Date: 2011-04-29T05:22:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Is everything object ?

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On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 02:23:32AM +0900, Josh Cheek wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 10:12 AM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
> >=20
> > I'm a little curious about why, to you, boolean methods are "relevant"
> > and other methods are not.  For that explanation, I would have just said
> > that methods are not objects -- rather than saying something like
> > "boolean methods aren't objects; let's not talk about other methods
> > (which also aren't, but we shouldn't say that)".
>
> Sorry, I wasn't very clear, it's a difficult subject to talk about
> because the language is largely ambiguous.
>=20
> Apparently, methods are *technically* not objects. Roger already
> brought it up above, and it's been discussed before
> (http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/424911). Now, given that we can
> request a method, and get an instance of Method, lets disregard this as
> it seems to me to be an implementation detail.
>=20
> So we can say that methods are objects, and everything suddenly makes
> sense again. Operators are methods, and methods are objects, so
> operators are objects. Except for boolean operators, which are not
> methods and thus not objects. They are basically keywords. Here are
> some examples:

Oh, you're talking about boolean operators.  I thought you were talking
about actual boolean *methods*:

    irb(main):001:0> foo =3D Hash.new
    =3D> {}
    irb(main):002:0> foo.empty?
    =3D> true

=2E . . but I dispute the argument you present that methods are objects.
The fact that one can wrap a method in a "method object" does not make
the method *itself* an object; it just creates an object that has a
particular kind of interface to the method.


>=20
> You can't request them as methods, and thus can't pass them as
> arguments or put them into block slots or store them in variables.
> true.method '&' # =3D> #<Method: TrueClass#&> true.method '&&' # ~>
> -:1:in `method': undefined method `&&' for class `TrueClass'
> (NameError)

Yeah -- that's because they aren't methods.  They're more like
punctuation.

--=20
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]

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