[vidarh]

And in Ruby they are only "special" because they have been intentionally hidden from the publicly visible inheritance chain. Personally I think that's what makes it hardest for people to grasp.

E.g. if you define class methods on class Foo, all that's happening is that the class of the object defining Foo is no longer an instance of Class but of a subclass of Class. But it gets confusing because Foo.class still returns Class.