coerce

The coerce method provides support for Ruby type coercion. It is not enabled by default.

This means that binary operations like + * / or - can often be performed on a BigDecimal and an object of another type, if the other object can be coerced into a BigDecimal value.

e.g. a = BigDecimal.new(“1.0”) b = a / 2.0 -> 0.5

Note that coercing a String to a BigDecimal is not supported by default; it requires a special compile-time option when building Ruby.