Unary operators behavior

Question

Had some weird results when redefining the unary + operator in Ruby on the Fixnum class. Not exactly sure why things are happening the way they are

Answer 1

This answer adds additional details to mu's answer.

Just learned about ruby's Ripper class, and it shows what's happening pretty clearly:

require 'ripper'

p Ripper.sexp('2')     # => [:program, [[:@int, "2", [1, 0]]]]
p Ripper.sexp('+2')    # => [:program, [[:@int, "+2", [1, 0]]]]
p Ripper.sexp('+(2)')  # => [:program, [[:unary, :+@, [:paren, [[:@int, "2", [1, 2]]]]]]]
p Ripper.sexp('++2')   # => [:program, [[:unary, :+@, [:@int, "+2", [1, 1]]]]]