Not really “magical syntactic sugar gone wild”, just “everything is an object”. In Ruby, integers can respond to messages just as well as anything else, and the

Not really “magical syntactic sugar gone wild”, just “everything is an object”. In Ruby, integers can respond to messages just as well as anything else, and the built-in “times” message takes a lambda (“closure” in the article). There is some small irony in that “times” is just a very thin wrapper for a “for” loop.