Question

the behavior I’m looking for is so I can define methods to get results like these:

> 2i
=> Complex(0,+2i)
> 2²
=> 4

Answer 1

For the first one, you could add a custom instance methods to Fixnum like this:

class Fixnum
  def i
    Complex(0, self)
  end
end

> 2.i
# => (0+2i)

And as J-_-L pointed out, you could do the same for the second one in Ruby 1.9, though your rb file will need # encoding: utf-8 at the top.

And as DNNX pointed out, the issue of creating imaginary numbers in Ruby is already addressed by the Complex class:

require 'complex'
2.im 
#=> (0+2i)