Why is the shovel operator (

Proof:

a="foo"
a.object_id #=> 2154889340
a << 'bar'
a.object_id #=> 2154889340
a += 'quux'
a.object_id #=> 2154742560

So << alters the original string rather than creating a new one. The reason for this is that in ruby a += b is syntactic shorthand for a = a + b (the same goes for the other <op>= operators) which is an assignment. On the other hand << is an alias of concat() which alters the receiver in-place.