On Tuesday 30 November 2004 12:07 pm, Charles Mills wrote: | Array#to_s is essentially Array#join with no args... irb uses #inspect | to display the result of each statement. It is a bit annoying when you | have highly nested objects and/or objects with lots of instance | variables that give you about a page and a half of output when inspect | is called. I guess if you know your class is going to be like that is | may be useful to define inspect something like the following: | ### | def inspect() | "#<#{self.class}: #{@very_important_ivar}>" | end | ### | Opinions may differ though... Indeed. I like the idea that #inspect produce a string that will produce an equivalent object when passed through #eval. This already works for literal forms like Array. T.