From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-02-13T05:32:01+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby course confusion

Dňa Nedeľa 12 Február 2006 21:16 Alex Combas napísal:
> On 2/11/06, Matthew Smillie <M.B.Smillie@sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Thanks Matthew, I appreciate you taking the time
> to reword this for me, but there is one part that is
> still bothering me.
>
> > > The block should take two parameters and return a boolean value.
>
> Its the thing with the boolean that I dont get. This seems to be asuming
> some prior knowledge of a particular ruby method.
> I've searched Array and String and dont see anything that fits.
>
> What is this boolean supposed to show? Booleans can me on/off
> true/false, found/not_found, or many other things.
>
> If the guide just stated what the boolean is for, or even better what
> method they want used that returns a boolean I'm sure this would
> be a rather simple problem.
>
> Finding the longest or shortest string in an array is so trivial.
> This really seems more like an exercise on howto structure blocks
> and pass variables to methods.

D'oh.

What I think are strong hints follows. Don't read this mail if you don't want 
any.

I think the block should be a predicate that defines if something was "found" 
- that's what the boolean it returns should tell. Or rather evaluate if an 
element is more "it" than the previous one found.

As for the two parameters, I think one should be an element from the array 
that's being iterated on, and another the last element for which the block 
returned true.

Let Enumerable#inject be an inspiration, I believe #find_it is supposed to 
have similar swissknifeitude. (Groan)

Alright, but I'm getting dangerously close to giving away complete spoilers, 
so I'll leave you some challenge to the problem.

David Vallner