What is the difference between Object.class and Object.class.inspect in Ruby?

Question

It seems like both of these methods return the same result (a human readable representation of the object and it's type). What is the differences between the methods?

class Foo

end

f = Foo.new
puts f.class          <==  puts Foo
puts f.class.inspect  <==  puts Foo

Answer 1

It seems like both of these methods return the same result (a human readable representation of the object and it's type).

No, they don't.

What is the differences between the methods?

Object#class returns the class of the receiver.

Module#inspect is an alias of Module#to_s and returns a human-readable string representation of the module. In particular, it returns the Module#name if it has one, and a unique representation otherwise. For singleton classes, it includes information about the object the singleton class is the singleton class of.

So, the two methods don't return the same result. In fact, they don't even return a result of the same class: Object#class returns an instance of the Class class, Module#inspect returns an instance of the String class.