From: Justin Johnson <justinj@...>
Date: 2002-08-01T03:59:43+09:00
Subject: Re: How to Emulate C/C++ Pointer/Reference in Ruby?


> The thing is that in Ruby, every variable holds a reference to some
> object, and variables are all at the same level of remove from their
> objects.  (This is probably wrong or different for immutables, but I'm
> excluding them for the moment.)  So if you have:

nil, true, false and FixNum are internally stored by value.  The runtime
checks for these special types and so if you type:

32.class

it gives you what you'd expect: "FixNum".  Even though:

val = 32

Stores the value in 'val' rather than creating a FixNum object of value 32
and setting 'val' as a reference to it.  That would have been easier and
more consistent but would have increased object creation and memory
footprint.  The price you pay is loosing 1 bit of information for FixNums.
:-)

Internally, I'm not sure why nil, true and false aren't handled as
references to instanced objects of class NilClass, TrueClass and FalseClass.
This would reduce the number of internal special case checks....Matz?

--
Justin Johnson.