Man, who down votes someone for asking a genuine question? This isn't monkey patching. Ruby's classes are open (they can be modified on the fly), so you can mo

Man, who down votes someone for asking a genuine question? This isn't monkey patching. Ruby's classes are open (they can be modified on the fly), so you can monkey patch modules with new functionality. In a language like C, if you wanted to extend a library, you might modify it and recompile. Ruby's module_eval and class_eval are meta-programming tools that let you programmatically add methods to classes (and lots of other stuff), this can be combined with monkey patching, if you so desire.