Ruby is awesome. Finding out that everything is an object, and because of that you can do things like in your example (10.whatever), is hilarious coming from other languages.
By the way, it isn’t actually necessary for everything to be an object to make this work. The language just has to define 10.whatever() to be syntactic sugar for whatever(10). Some languages, like Python and Rust, have an explicit self parameter on their methods to help illustrate this.
But yeah, a bunch of languages decided to special-case their objects instead, for whatever reason.
That’s not quite right, the language has defined Int#days and 10 is actually Int(10). 10.days calls the instance method days on an instance of an Int (it has been years since I’ve used ruby so not sure if the stdlib class is actually Int)
Ah, I’m not talking about Ruby, I’m talking about language design in general.
I’m currently mostly doing Rust, so I can only really name that as an example (even though there’s very likely other languages that allow this, too), but yeah, here’s for example the 64-bit signed integer in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/primitive.i64.html
That is a primitive type, not an object, so it is exactly 64-bits in size and stored on the stack, not the heap. But as you can see in the documentation, Rust allows for associated functions anyways, like for example:
letmy_number: i64 = -3;
my_number.abs() //returns the absolute value, so 3
That’s because that last call is just syntactic sugar for calling the same function statically on the type:
Ruby is awesome. Finding out that everything is an object, and because of that you can do things like in your example (10.whatever), is hilarious coming from other languages.
By the way, it isn’t actually necessary for everything to be an object to make this work. The language just has to define
10.whatever()to be syntactic sugar forwhatever(10). Some languages, like Python and Rust, have an explicitselfparameter on their methods to help illustrate this.But yeah, a bunch of languages decided to special-case their objects instead, for whatever reason.
That’s not quite right, the language has defined Int#days and 10 is actually Int(10). 10.days calls the instance method days on an instance of an Int (it has been years since I’ve used ruby so not sure if the stdlib class is actually Int)
Ah, I’m not talking about Ruby, I’m talking about language design in general.
I’m currently mostly doing Rust, so I can only really name that as an example (even though there’s very likely other languages that allow this, too), but yeah, here’s for example the 64-bit signed integer in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/primitive.i64.html
That is a primitive type, not an object, so it is exactly 64-bits in size and stored on the stack, not the heap. But as you can see in the documentation, Rust allows for associated functions anyways, like for example:
let my_number: i64 = -3; my_number.abs() //returns the absolute value, so 3That’s because that last call is just syntactic sugar for calling the same function statically on the type:
i64::abs(my_number)