Glad to be of help.

STDIN is indeed a constant defined  in Module and its value is the  
standard input stream (which is an instance of IO). To me the strange  
thing is that Kernel#gets is OK, but Kernel#getc is deprecated.

Regards, Morton

On Jul 19, 2006, at 8:05 AM, simonh wrote:

> Very helpful reply Morton. Understand case a lot more now. One thing.
> STDIN.getc
> what exactly is STDIN? Does it belong to a class or is it a constant?
> looking through ri I noticed that Kernel.getc is now obsolete. Any  
> idea
> why this is?
>
> cheers