"Christoph Rippel" <crippel / primenet.com> writes: > I did not understand that the parsing rules of > Ruby imply that a plain `sym = x' is interpreted > as a '(self.sym) = x' ... . Actually it's the other way around: sym = ... is interpreted as an assignment to a local variable. That's why you need an explicit 'self.' to make it a method call. Dave