From: "Aleksi Niemelä" <Aleksi.Niemela@...>
Date: 2001-01-20T19:43:24+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:9597] Re: 101 Misconceptions About Dynamic Languages

Josh Stern comments someone else comment about Ruby's first-class 
objects:

>> Ruby does not have functions as first-class objects. You cannot pass a
>> function as an argument, nor return one as a result.
> 
> 
> At http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/compar.html, Matz says
> "Ruby's functions (methods) are not first class objects"
> but I don't understand this point, actually.  Ruby does
> have the 'Proc' class which is a function object.
> Just like in C++, an instance method requires object to use
> it.  However, one can easily pass tuples of
> <object,methodName>, <moduleName,methodName>,
> <object,methodSymbol>, etc.
> which amounts to the same thing in Ruby because the thing
> that is invoked by a function call in the language
> is 'the thing bound to that name', not a hunk of
> code at a machine address.

I'd like to note that Ruby has Method class. You can check it's 
workings from

   http://www.rubycentral.com/ref/ref_c_object.html#method

and

   http://www.rubycentral.com/ref/ref_c_method.html

The main thing is there's already a class to represent the tuple 
you mention, it's tied to all objects (through Object), and it 
works nicely with procs.

   - Aleksi