From: Christopher Campbell <spamoff.danx@...>
Date: 2006-01-01T10:42:56+09:00
Subject: Tuples/Records/Quicky Objects + Read Only Arrays?

Hi,

Does Ruby have a tuple or quicky object mechanism?  I'm new to Ruby and 
have become stuck on how to solve the following.

I'm testing adding items to a container, where each item is a pair of 
strings.  One is a name and another an alias.  As they're added a check 
should be performed to see if they're in the container, etc.

I've been using OCaml for a while, and for this I'd just use a list of 
tuples of strings.  What's the ruby way of doing this?   Iterating over 
a container/array is a doddle, that's not the problem.  The problem is 
really can you have quick pairs without making classes and so on?

While I'm at it, is there a read only array like container?  Don't want 
anyone messing with the internal array, they should not know that what's 
returned is actually the internal representation or fiddle with it. 
Don't care what they do with the elements in the array, only the array 
itself.

class X
   def initialize
     @elements = Array.new
   end

   ...

   def elements
     @elements.clone
   end
end

Returning a clone of an array is fine, just wondered if you could 
"write-protect" stuff in general.


Thanks,
Chris