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Ruby Programming
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Operator Expressions

Ruby has the basic set of operators (+, -, *, /, and so on) as well as a few surprises. A complete list of the operators, and their precedences, is given in Table 18.4 on page 219.

In Ruby, many operators are actually method calls. When you write a*b+c you're actually asking the object referenced by a to execute the method ``*'', passing in the parameter b. You then ask the object that results from that calculation to execute ``+'', passing c as a parameter. This is exactly equivalent to writing

(a.*(b)).+(c)

Because everything is an object, and because you can redefine instance methods, you can always redefine basic arithmetic if you don't like the answers you're getting.

class Fixnum
  alias oldPlus +
  def +(other)
    oldPlus(other).succ
  end
end
1 + 2 4
a = 3
a += 4 8

More useful is the fact that classes that you write can participate in operator expressions just as if they were built-in objects. For example, we might want to be able to extract a number of seconds of music from the middle of a song. We could using the indexing operator ``[]'' to specify the music to be extracted.

class Song
  def [](fromTime, toTime)
    result = Song.new(self.title + " [extract]",
                      self.artist,
                      toTime - fromTime)
    result.setStartTime(fromTime)
    result
  end
end

This code fragment extends class Song with the method ``[]'', which takes two parameters (a start time and an end time). It returns a new song, with the music clipped to the given interval. We could then play the introduction to a song with code such as:

aSong[0, 0.15].play
Ruby Programming
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