Hi, I actually registered here to ask a different question, but after checking the core docs for 1.8.7 I realized that the behavior has apparently changed, but as part of the registration process I was asked to enter the result of: puts ((11.to_s * 2).to_i/2) I don't know Ruby very well, but this one seemed pretty straight-forward, in that it was supposed to convert the number (object) 11 to a string, double it ('1111') then convert it back to an integer and divide by two. Since these are integers the answer would be: 555. But here's where it gets strange. Since I'm new to Ruby I thought I'd play with it a bit, and since I thought that whitespace wasn't supposed to matter, I did: >> 11.to_s * 2 => "1111" >> 11.to_s *2 => "1011" >> 11.to_s*2 => "1111" I thought, maybe this is a problem with irb, so I wrote a little program: #!/usr/bin/env ruby puts (11.to_s * 2) puts (11.to_s *2) puts (11.to_s*2) And when I run it, I see: 1111 1011 1111 Can anyone explain why the '11.to_s *2' gave me 1011? Is this a 1.8.7 problem? The Ruby version on my Mac OS X Lion system is: ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10 patchlevel 249) [universal-darwin11.0]. Thanks, Rob -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.