Thomas Luedeke wrote:

/ ...

> Also, I have substantial amounts of experience coding pseudo-OO Fortran
> 95, so I do have some idea on how OO programming works (although not the
> depths of inheritance and other OO concepts that are not well
> implemented in Fortran 95).

With that as a background, it's clear that Ruby is quite far removed from
languages you have used until now. In that case, I recommend that you
acquire a copy of the pickaxe ("Programming Ruby") book, and/or look at the
online Ruby resources including the code examples in this newsgroup, using
Google as your indexer.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com