From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2004-07-18T22:57:31+09:00
Subject: Re: [NUBY] Ruby Way code for shuffling an array doesn't behave as   expected

Florian Gross wrote:
> Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> 
>> One example in The Ruby Way claims that in the following snippet second
>> line shuffles the a (i.e., makes an array consisting of the same
>> elements as a, but in a different order).
> 
> 
> By the way, if you just want to shuffle an Array you can also use the 
> much simpler ary.sort_by { rand }. (It will get minimally biased with 
> containers containing millions of elements, but that can be fixed by 
> using Array.new(32) { rand } instead of rand.)

And by the way, the code which modified the array while iterating
was probably ill-advised from the beginning, although it did work
in 1.6.8.


Hal