[ruby-talk:7164] |<variable>| notation?

I come from a structured programming background and have done very little
OOP stuff in the last few years (I did some way back in school though) so
Ruby's syntax and indeed it's concept (OOP) is fairly new to me.. I hope  
all will forgive the somewhat simple questions I'm sure I'll ask on here  
:-)

Anyway, on with the simple questions.. 

I've gone over the documentation and perhaps I missed the section where
this was explained (or maybe it's a standard OOP notation) but I'm a
little confused as to what it actually does.. 

I have some examples, including those from Doctor Dobbs Journal (Nice
article, convinced me to look into Ruby). These examples use something
like this :

Thread.start(@listen.accept) do |aConnection|

Ok, I'll take a guess here but I want to make sure i'm right and that I
understand this..

Does the above assign the returning value of @listen.accept to the
variable aConnection (Which is more or less a socket descriptor)? I
suppose that's pretty obvious, as that's how it does seem to work in the
rest of the code, I've just never seen an assignment made like that.. 

If anyone could take just a second to school me a little, I'd be
very grateful.

Thanks!


-Mitch