[cdcarter]

> Operators are unique in the language. They hold a special place. They deliberately are written to imply something we already understand. No fair lumping them in with every other attribute or method of an encapsulated type.

I would argue that a CORE value of Ruby is that everything is an object, and objects communication by message passing. Treating an operator as anything other than a message between objects is fundamentally wrong.

If you expect operators to do anything other than call the appropriate message on an object, you're misunderstanding the syntax.

[msbarnett]

Indeed, in a very real sense Ruby simply doesn't have "syntactic operators" in the C-ish sense he seems to regard them.

Ruby only has messages. Some of those messages just happen to have punctuation for names.