That’s not quite right, the language has defined Int#days and 10 is actually Int(10). 10.days calls the instance method days on an instance of an Int (it has been years since I’ve used ruby so not sure if the stdlib class is actually Int)
days is a method on the Numeric class in Rails, and it creates an instance of ActiveSupport::Duration with self passed to the constructor (this is a bit of a simplification, because it actually calls the class method days on Duration which converts the number of days into seconds before creating the Duration instance).
Oh god good ol ActiveSupport. I’m having flashbacks of so many ruby projects trying not to bring it in and basically reinventing it but poorly documented.
I still would say it was the language I’ve most enjoyed (professionally used most all higher level languages over 20+ years) but it might be nostalgia for a time early 2010s when rails was just freaking magic compared to the ways we used to build web apps.
Ah, I’m not talking about Ruby, I’m talking about language design in general.
I’m currently mostly doing Rust, so I can only really name that as an example (even though there’s very likely other languages that allow this, too), but yeah, here’s for example the 64-bit signed integer in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/primitive.i64.html
That is a primitive type, not an object, so it is exactly 64-bits in size and stored on the stack, not the heap. But as you can see in the documentation, Rust allows for associated functions anyways, like for example:
letmy_number: i64 = -3;
my_number.abs() //returns the absolute value, so 3
That’s because that last call is just syntactic sugar for calling the same function statically on the type:
That’s not quite right, the language has defined Int#days and 10 is actually Int(10). 10.days calls the instance method days on an instance of an Int (it has been years since I’ve used ruby so not sure if the stdlib class is actually Int)
daysis a method on theNumericclass in Rails, and it creates an instance ofActiveSupport::Durationwithselfpassed to the constructor (this is a bit of a simplification, because it actually calls the class methoddaysonDurationwhich converts the number of days into seconds before creating theDurationinstance).Oh god good ol ActiveSupport. I’m having flashbacks of so many ruby projects trying not to bring it in and basically reinventing it but poorly documented.
I still would say it was the language I’ve most enjoyed (professionally used most all higher level languages over 20+ years) but it might be nostalgia for a time early 2010s when rails was just freaking magic compared to the ways we used to build web apps.
Ah, I’m not talking about Ruby, I’m talking about language design in general.
I’m currently mostly doing Rust, so I can only really name that as an example (even though there’s very likely other languages that allow this, too), but yeah, here’s for example the 64-bit signed integer in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/primitive.i64.html
That is a primitive type, not an object, so it is exactly 64-bits in size and stored on the stack, not the heap. But as you can see in the documentation, Rust allows for associated functions anyways, like for example:
let my_number: i64 = -3; my_number.abs() //returns the absolute value, so 3That’s because that last call is just syntactic sugar for calling the same function statically on the type:
i64::abs(my_number)