I'm writing a simple piece of code in ruby, but it's not working the way I expect it to at all. I think this problem comes from a misunderstanding of how ruby works, specifically, how the assignment operator works, relative to other languages. Here's what I've written:
@instance1 = @clock
@clock.tick!
@clock.tick!
@clock.tick!
@instance2 = @clock
puts " instace1.seconds: #{@instance1.seconds}, instance2.seconds: #{@instance2.seconds}"
'Clock' is a class and has a value, seconds, a method 'tick!' which increases seconds by one, and a method 'seconds' which returns the seconds value. Seconds is initalized as 0.
Now when I run this code, the output is: " instace1.seconds: 3, instance2.seconds: 3"
But the output I would expect is: " instance1.seconds: 0, instance2.seconds: 3"
Because, I've assigned intance1 the values which @clock had before I changed clock, and I did nothing to modify @instance1 thereafter.
To me this implies that ruby assigns objects as pointers in some contexts, and that there's implicit dereferencing going on. What are these contexts? (class variables?, large objects? )
How do I make an explicit assignment? In other words, how do I dereference a variable?
Like, in C, I would do something like:
*instance1 = *c
(although it's been a long time since pointer-arithmatic, so that's a rough example
