[jacques_chester]

> Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno!

Neither. It's a message sent to an object. The object decides how to respond to that message.

Caring about the implementation of the message receiver breaks information hiding. If you have to distinguish between .message and .message(), you already know more than you need to know to interact with that object.

Every language is confusing until you understand the mental model (even if you disagree with the utility of that model). If you come to Ruby thinking in Java/C++/C terms, you'll be unhappy, because the mental model is very different.

For Ruby, the book to read is The Well-Grounded Rubyist, which makes the language quite obvious.

[davexunit]

I've been programming in Ruby for years, and the inherent ambiguity proven by the complexity of the parser isn't made better by telling me I'm not thinking right.

Variables and methods are treated differently. I can't pass arguments to a variable, I can't even write foo(), but if it were a method I could. I can't treat variables like any other object because they have different rules applied.

[jacques_chester]

> I can't pass arguments to a variable

I'm confused -- if you're knowingly invoking a method, why are you unsure whether it's a method or a variable?

I programmed for years in Ruby too. I just accepted a whole bunch of stuff as mysterious and shrugged. It didn't mean the language was ambiguous, I just didn't have any idea of what the actual model was.

[dragonwriter]

Actually, you're wrong. The syntactic ambiguity between local variable references and implicit self method calls us not accurately resolved by thinking of it as message sends because it's only a message sends if it is a self method call, not it is a local variable reference. This is a real syntactic ambiguity in Ruby.

[jacques_chester]

The book I pointed to also discusses the concept of self. It's not really that ambiguous.