From: George Ogata <g_ogata@...>
Date: 2005-11-27T22:52:28+09:00
Subject: Re: recursion

"cyberco" <cyberco@gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks! That is certaily a elegant solution, but I wonder what the
> logic behind it is. I can't find any documentation on this usage of
> ranges, any pointers?

Here's how you get there:

('aaa'..'zzz').to_a is clearly a call to Range#to_a.

* `ri Range` tells you that Range gets #to_a from Enumerable.
* `ri Enumerable#to_a` tells you that it returns the elements yielded by
  a call to #each.  (Oh wait, it doesn't.  It should... .  Really,
  it's no secret that all of Enumerable's methods are defined in terms
  of #each, but I can't find it anywhere in the rdoc comments.)
* `ri Range#each` tells you that the elements yielded come from
  successive calls to each element's #succ method, starting with the
  start object ('aaa' in this case).
* `ri String#succ` tells you that 'aaa'.succ will return 'aab' (and so
  on).
* Profit!  (Er... QED.)

HTH,
George.