2008/8/20 Sam Hendley <sam.hendley / plymouthsystems.com>: > Hello, this is my first post to this list and I have only been using > ruby for a couple of weeks so forgive me if its overly simple, I spent a > few hours searching and wasn't able to figure this out myself. Welcome Sam. Before answering, let me ask you two more questions :-) 1) Why are you asking the instances about the extra methods? Instead of Foo.new.extra_methods I would expect Foo.extra_methods Or do you want to define extra methods for individual objects, too? 2) How deep will your class hierarchy be? What about subclasses of Foo, for example, after class SubFoo < Foo add_method :foo_4 end what should be the result of SubFoo.new.extra_methods.size BTW: the normal indentation of Ruby code is with two spaces per level. Regards, Pit