I was confused by Ruby’s variable assignment paradigm for a while, and even after reading this Stackoverflow thread and checking out out other threads about the same thing I was no closer to understanding it clearly. And in the words of the great Albert Einstein …

“if you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough”

I eventually figured it out by reading page 53-54 of what I think is the best Ruby book on the market right now, turns out its actually pretty simple to understand.

Ruby ALWAYS passes references to objects on assignment, BUT some types in ruby are stored in variables as immediate values because they are immutable.

For example (you can try these out in irb)

me = we = “we”
me #=> “we”
we #=> “we”
me.upcase!
me #=> “WE”
we #=> “WE”

me = we = [1, 2, 3]
we #=> [1, 2, 3]
me #=> [1, 2, 3]
we << 4
we #=> [1, 2, 3, 4]
me #=> [1, 2, 3, 4]

Ruby does this for all its types, but with primitives that are immutable, namely integers, symbols, nil, and the booleans true and false, it takes a shortcut and actually stores the value IN the variable itself, because … what are you going to do? change an immutable object? 🙂

Pretty clever when you think about it IMO.