>>24
besides some quibbles (eg "Ruby cant distinguishing a method call from an operator" well, shouldn't operators essentially be methods/functions?
Please, read original article:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/references/ruby/doc_bundle/FAQ/FAQ.html
Ruby works hard to distinguish method calls from operators, and variable names from method names. Unfortunately, there's no way it can get it right all the time. In this case, ``a +b'' is parsed as ``a(+b)''. Remove the space to the left of ``+'' or add a space to the right of ``+,'' and it will be parsed as an addition.