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The Second Object: other

Programming in Ruby wouldn't be very much fun if only the self object were available; it would be no more interesting than living in a world all alone. We would like to be able to populate our universe with more objects.

If we want another object that we can simply call “other,” we say

						other = Object.new
					

This is pretty close to how you would state the request out loud: “Let other be a new object.” But as it turns out, there is a good reason for the reversal of the last two words in the statement: new is a method name, a message which requests that a new object be created. What receives the message is not an object in the sense that we have so far understood, but a Class object. For now you don't have to worry about ...