Ruby Programming/Reference/Predefined Classes

In ruby even the base types (also predefined classes) can be hacked.quirks In the following example, 5 is an immediate,immediate a literal, an object, and an instance of Fixnum. class Fixnum alias other_s to_s def to_s() a = self + 5 return a.other_s end end a = 5 puts a.class ## prints Fixnum puts a ## prints 10 (adds 5 once) puts 0 ## prints 5 (adds 5 once) puts 5 ## prints 10 (adds 5 once) puts 10 + 0 ## prints 15 (adds 5 once) b = 5+5 puts b ## puts 15 (adds 5 once) Footnotes immediate Which means the 4 VALUE bytes are not a reference but the value itself. All 5 have the same object id (which could also be achieved in other ways). quirks Might not always work as you would like, the base types don't have a constructor (def initialize), and can't have singleton methods. There are some other minor exceptions.