Reading the thread about regexp matches made me wonder about this:

  def File.read(s)
    File.new(s).read(nil)
  end

Then File.new("filename").read(nil) could be written more simply and
readably as File.read("filename") -- rather like "atime" is implemented
both as a class method and an instance method.  Are there reasons not to
do such things? (more methods => performance suffers, perhaps?)