From: Gavin Kistner <gavin@...>
Date: 2005-11-28T05:22:41+09:00
Subject: Re: recursion

On Nov 25, 2005, at 3:52 PM, mathew wrote:
> cyberco wrote:
>> I'm trying to print every combination of three characters from the
>> range (a..z). I thought recursion would be the most elegant solution,
>> but that got me quite confused :)  Any suggestions?
>
> Definitely not recursion.  Consider that your problem is equivalent  
> to printing every possible 3 digit number in base 26 :-)

Which leads to this alternative solution:

( 'aaa'.to_i(36)..'zzz'.to_i(36) ).map{ |i| (str=i.to_s(36)) =~ /^[a- 
z]{3}$/ && str }.compact

Far less elegant than 'aaa'..'zzz', but there you have it. :)