From: Patrick Gundlach <clr9.10.randomuser@...>
Date: 2005-12-08T07:07:35+09:00
Subject: Re: increasing counter whithin loop?


[...]

> If you're really tied to the traditional for loop, you can use a while loop 
> and do the increment yourself at the end of the loop, but usually you find a 
> better way to do it in Ruby that doesn't involve going through the chars one 
> at a time, and that's why we rarely use the for construct.

That is exactly what I am trying to find. I have a list (Array) of
different elements, which I want to render below each other, except
when there are two elements of type 'b', they can be put next to each
other. So I think I need a check like 'if this element is == 'b' and
next element is also == 'b', then render them next to each other. This
rendering has to be known in advance, so I can't use information if
the last element is of type 'b' (with the second occurance of 'b'). 

Of course, I can write a while loop, but this would be 

a) setting some counter to 0
b) accessing the elements via [] (index)
c) checking on counter <=> sequence.length

all which are acceptable, but don't look like the nice ruby builtins
that I am used to. The 

sequence.each do |element|
 ....
end

would be nice, but I understand that there is no
'skip_the_next_element'-method. So the next nicer attempt would be 

for counter in 0...element.size
  # ...
  increase_counter_by_one_to_skip_one_interation
end

But - contradicting my intuition - doesn't seem to work/exist. So I
have to stick to an ugly while loop.... ;-) So my question is: did I
miss something? Is there any reason why we can't manipulate the
counter within the loop?

Patrick