[msbarnett]

How does this make it confusing? What information do you feel () gives you?

You might say:

      foo().bar().baz()

Ah well these are clearly method calls, they have ().

But this is Ruby:

      foo.bar.baz

These are clearly method calls too, because in Ruby there’s nothing else they could possibly be. The ()s don’t actually disambiguate anything. Unlike C or Java or some other languages with some notion of bare access to internal fields, there are always and only method calls.