ruby: what does the asterisk in "p *1..10" mean

It's the splat operator. You'll often see it used to split an array into parameters to a function.

def my_function(param1, param2, param3)  param1 + param2 + param3endmy_values = [2, 3, 5]my_function(*my_values) # returns 10

More commonly it is used to accept an arbitrary number of arguments

def my_other_function(to_add, *other_args)  other_args.map { |arg| arg + to_add }endmy_other_function(1, 6, 7, 8) # returns [7, 8, 9]

It also works for multiple assignment (although both of these statements will work without the splat):

first, second, third = *my_values*my_new_array = 7, 11, 13

For your example, these two would be equivalent:

p *1..10p 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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