From: Pete Elmore <pete@...>
Date: 2004-11-04T19:14:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Hashes and Blocks (Syntactical/Feature question)

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Thanks for all of the helpful responses!

"Gavin Sinclair" <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> wrote:
| states = Hash.new( lambda { puts "fallback" } ).update(
That's interesting; it had not occurred to me to use the default hash
value like that.

"Jim Haungs" <jhaungs@acm.org> wrote:
| What you're trying to do is an example of the State pattern, which is
| often implemented with sensibly-named states (as opposed to the
| numbers in the example here).
Yeah, actually, I was simplifying it a little; I used names for the states.
| With the hash table scheme, the cohesion is poor because the current
| machine state is separated from the operations on that state.
Very good point.  But writing a class to handle a state machine for a
program that was about thirty lines could have made it quite a bit
longer/more complicated.  ;)

The program actually generated Ruby code that was used by another Ruby
program to perform the tedious task of writing assembly language for the
PIC microcontroller (whew).
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