Thanks, nitrogen. Following your info led to a couple of other neat discoveries, and a bunch more useful material [1]. As a result here are some new ways I lea

Thanks, nitrogen. Following your info led to a couple of other neat discoveries, and a bunch more useful material [1]. As a result here are some new ways I learned to get 5 from 2 + 2: require 'fiddle' a = 2 b = 2 Fiddle::Pointer.new(a.object_id << 1).to_value.ceil + b => 5 Note: This happens because calling `to_value` on the `Fiddle::Pointer` object returns a Float (2.0000000000000004) instead of Fixnum (which was a surprise to me). And here's another using `Object#tap`: a = 2 (a + a).tap{|x| a = x + 1}.send(:eval,'a') => 5 [1] These links were helpful for me. The last one is an MIT licensed book called, "Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity." http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1872110/is-ruby-pass-by-reference-or-by-value http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1872110/is-ruby-pass-by-r... http://patshaughnessy.net/2014/1/9/how-big-is-a-bignum http://patshaughnessy.net/2014/1/9/how-big-is-a-bignum http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2818602/in-ruby-why-does-inspect-print-out-some-kind-of-object-id-which-is-different http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2818602/in-ruby-why-does-... http://combinators.info/#kestrels http://combinators.info/#kestrels Edit: line formatting