No worries, thanks for taking the time to write it out. I'm glad that I wrote the post (and that I'm getting hammered a little for my assumptions) because making mistakes is probably the only way I'm going to get a deeper understanding of the language...

One thing that confused the issue a little for me is the fact that some objects in Ruby are actually only really 'pretend objects'. ie:

  >> test = 4
  => 4
  >> test2 = 4
  => 4
  >> test.object_id
  => 9
  >> test2.object_id
  => 9

I don't know enough about the deeper parts of the language to know what else there is that's like this though...