• v_krishna@lemmy.ml
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    15 hours ago

    That’s not quite right, the language has defined Int#days and 10 is actually Int(10). 10.days calls the instance method days on an instance of an Int (it has been years since I’ve used ruby so not sure if the stdlib class is actually Int)

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      10 hours ago

      Ah, I’m not talking about Ruby, I’m talking about language design in general.

      I’m currently mostly doing Rust, so I can only really name that as an example (even though there’s very likely other languages that allow this, too), but yeah, here’s for example the 64-bit signed integer in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/primitive.i64.html

      That is a primitive type, not an object, so it is exactly 64-bits in size and stored on the stack, not the heap. But as you can see in the documentation, Rust allows for associated functions anyways, like for example:

      let my_number: i64 = -3;
      my_number.abs()  //returns the absolute value, so 3
      

      That’s because that last call is just syntactic sugar for calling the same function statically on the type:

      i64::abs(my_number)