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Comment by jamesbritt | Hacker News Reader

Now instead of "foo".freeze it's "foo"f, but how frequently will that save you time/trouble?

Worse, it seems to break the model of "interact with objects by sending messages", where you send a message using

    <object>.<message>

Is "foo"f _not_ sending a message? If so, then what is it doing? If yes, then why new syntax?

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It's not sending a message - that would defeat the purpose. It's constructing a frozen string, reusing an existing one when possible.

Prior to 2.1:

    def foo
      "bar".freeze
    end

does these things every time `foo` is called:

1. copies the characters 'b', 'a', and 'r' into a mutable string

2. sends the message `freeze` to the new string, which...

3. marks the string as frozen.

In 2.1 `"bar".freeze` is equivalent to `"bar"f`, which will not make a copy every time `foo` is called. See https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8579 for more discussion.

I see. Thank you.

it is not sending a message any more than 0b100 is sending a message. this is syntax for a type.

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