Rubyisms in Rails

Section 2. Objects, Classes, and Modules

Like many modern programming languages, Ruby is object oriented. However, Ruby could be considered to be a purer object-oriented language than many. To see what I mean, let’s look closer at that expression 30.minutes.ago from the previous example. You might have naturally assumed that it is a bit of syntactic sugar, something that the Ruby interpreter intercepts and translates into something real like Time.now - 30*60 upon execution. Indeed, that is how it would have to work in languages such as C++, Java, and PHP, where integers, floats, and sometimes strings are treated as primitives below the OOP framework. In Ruby, however, everything is an object—even integers—as the following example demonstrates. ...