Gregory Seidman
6/2/2007 4:03:00 AM
On Sat, Jun 02, 2007 at 12:42:54PM +0900, Vin Raja wrote:
> Well while running down the text I read that [] (used in case Arrays and
> Hashes) is actually a method called on that Array/hash object and also
> that it can be overridden.
>
> well point taken.
>
> BUT if this is just another case of operator overloading then how come
> we can call
>
> a[1]='item'
>
> rather than calling
>
> a[]1 ='item'
>
> (Anyways this gave me a syntax error)
> Or perhaps it is just another case of Syntactic Sugar?
> Or perhaps not, because if that has to be true than the second statement
> should also have been true.
>
> So Is [] really a method or is a simple grammar token?
Everything is a token in the grammar, of course. When the code is being
parsed the [] is matched as a token, in this case the brackets operator.
The reason your first example works and your second does not is that the
grammar rules for the brackets operator take the arguments to the operator
from between the literal open and close bracket characters. Placing those
arguments outside the brackets, unsurprisingly, does not work.
Since all operators are implemented as method calls in Ruby, the text is
indeed correct in that [] is called as a method on an Array, Hash, or
whatever the object is.
Note, by the way, that the operator in your examples is actually []= rather
than [], i.e. it is an element assignment rather than an element retrieval.
> Thanks
> Raja
--Greg