itsme213 wrote:

> Where would I find a nice summary of to_s, inspect, p, etc. and the core
> ones to override for various purposes?

I think ri would help, but I will summarize this below.

> Are to_s, inspect, etc. defined more-or-less consistently for the library
> classes? Are they used consistently by the various tools like irb, debug,
> test/unit, breakpoint, etc?

..inspect is usually used for debug purposes and .to_s for end-user 
purposes. p obj is the same as puts obj.inspect. irb and breakpoint both 
use .inspect -- I am not sure about test/unit but would it expect it to 
also use it.

> I often find myself with quite unhelpful presentations of objects e.g. when
> a test/unit assertion fails, I might get a 2-page long description of one of
> the objects involved. For my own classes I poke around at to_s and friends
> but it often feels like guesswork.

prettyprint.rb helps in that case -- it wraps and indents the structure 
of the Object. There's also an extension that provides pp_s which is to 
pp as inspect is to p.