>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: bascule@[...].com [mailto:bascule@[...].com] On Behalf Of Tony
>  To reiterate from my previous message, because the behavior of Numerics
>  is already a special case to begin with.

How? Because they are immutable? That's not special casing, that's just
how the class is designed.  I can write an immutable class in Ruby,
without any special casing.