Clarification on the Ruby << Operator

Question

I am quite new to Ruby and am wondering about the << operator. When I googled this operator, it says that it is a Binary Left Shift Operator given this ex

Answer 1

The << function, according to http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Array.html#method-i-3C-3C, is an append function. It appends the passed-in value to the array and then returns the array itself. Ruby objects can often have functions defined on them that, in other languages, would look like an operator.