From: William Morgan <wmorgan-ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2005-03-16T00:32:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Is iterating in lock-step possible?

Excerpts from Roshan James's mail of 15 Mar 2005 (EST):
> At this point I need to ask you a question -
> How do internal iterators work? How do they manage state? I havent seen
> a description of this anywhere. 
> I know about creating objects for iteration. How do the internal
> itertors differ from these?

The iteration state is all in the iterator method. For example, look at
how the Fibonacci series is written:

  def fib
    a = 1
    b = 0
    yield 0
    while true
      x = a + b
      yield x
      a = b
      b = x
    end
  end

  fib { |n| puts n; break if n > 100 }

All the state (a, b, and x) is in the iterator method.

So the difference between external and internal iterators is: rather
than repeatedly calling an "step" method on an "iterator object" and
doing something with the result, you call an "iterator method" once, and
pass it a lexical closure (in Ruby, a Proc object), and *it* then calls
the Proc on each element.

Internal iterators are not a Ruby-specific construct, nor are they
explicitly built-in to Ruby, except in the sense that the syntactic
sugar makes them very easy to do, and the API uses them all over. Think
of them as a different "style" of iteration.

Hope that answers your question. 

-- 
William <wmorgan-ruby-talk@masanjin.net>