On 6/19/07, Robert Dober <robert.dober / gmail.com> wrote:

> I do not want to argue with the wise guys if it is an error - I
> clearly thought so but that is not important ;)
> But it really would have saved me an hour of debugging if the doc
> stated clearly that singletons are not included. I thought this might
> help others and as it took me 20s to vim the missing line into class.c

As far as I can tell, singleton classes aren't mentioned in the doc.
The documentation borders on folklore.

Singletons as a means of implementing both individual instance, and
class behavior have a position like "the man behind the curtain" in
"The Wizard of OZ."  We're really supposed to disregard them. <G>

Coming from a background in Smalltalk, my preference would be if this
machinery were more visible and official, but Matz has his reasons for
not doing so.  For one thing, not documenting it, and hiding it from
methods like ancestors and class makes it easier to tinker with as the
language evolves without "officially" breaking backward compatibility.

I wrote a bit more about this a couple of months ago
http://frodo:4072/articles/2007/04/23/ideas-for-improving-ruby

look in the section "Free the metaclass"

But those are  just my opinions, I'm just glad I'm here!

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/