From: Kendall Gifford <zettabyte@...>
Date: 2012-03-07T11:34:17+09:00
Subject: Re: http://ruby-doc.org/docs/keywords/1.9/ : (Object)

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 7:18 PM, Carina C. Zona <cczona@gmail.com> wrote:
> Object is their class, and the root object in Ruby.  (Well,
> technically BasicObject is now the root object.  But that's if you
> want to bypass the rest of the object heirarchy.)  As shown in the
> core docs, similar notation is standard for all methods.
>

Hmm, I was under the impression that keywords were distinct from
methods. After all, I can't explicitly specify a receiver when using a
keyword:

$ irb
1.9.2-p290 :001 > self.begin
NoMethodError: undefined method `begin' for main:Object
	from (irb):1
	from /Users/kendall/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'
1.9.2-p290 :002 > self.def hi
NameError: undefined local variable or method `hi' for main:Object
	from (irb):2
	from /Users/kendall/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'

As such, I'm also confused why a *keyword* is somehow affiliated with
a class. I'd guess/assume it's just how the RDoc engine works and was
used to document keywords (???) as opposed to it actually indicating
that keywords are somehow implemented as methods on Object. I'd love
to know, semantically speaking as well as technically, what the case
is here.

-- 
Kendall Gifford
zettabyte@gmail.com