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Ruby Programming
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Class Names Are Constants

We've said that when you invoke a class method, all you're doing is sending a message to the Class object itself. When you say something such as String.new("gumby"), you're sending the message new to the object that is class String. But how does Ruby know to do this? After all, the receiver of a message should be an object reference, which implies that there must be a constant called ``String'' somewhere containing a reference to the String object.[It will be a constant, not a variable, because ``String'' starts with an uppercase letter.] And in fact, that's exactly what happens. All the built-in classes, along with the classes you define, have a corresponding global constant with the same name as the class. This is both straightforward and subtle. The subtlety comes from the fact that there are actually two things named (for example) String in the system. There's a constant that references an object of class String, and there's the object itself.

The fact that class names are just constants means that you can treat classes just like any other Ruby object: you can copy them, pass them to methods, and use them in expressions.

def factory(klass, *args)
  klass.new(*args)
end
factory(String, "Hello") "Hello"
factory(Dir,    ".") #<Dir:0x401b51bc>
flag = true
(flag ? Array : Hash)[1, 2, 3, 4] [1, 2, 3, 4]
flag = false
(flag ? Array : Hash)[1, 2, 3, 4] {1=>2, 3=>4}

Ruby Programming
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