From: A Bull in the China Shop of Life <feoh@...>
Date: 2001-07-20T01:25:29+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18128] Debugging minimalism for newbies (Re:  Re: An  exercise in minimalism)

At 12:19 AM 7/20/01 +0900, David Alan Black spewed forth:
>Hi --
>
>On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Chris Moline wrote:
>
> > Here's a first attempt. It weighs in at 66 bytes.
> >
> > (n=$*[0].to_i).times{|i|s=((n-1)/2-i).abs
> > puts " "*s+"#"*(n-2*s)}
>       ^
>
>You can take out that space, in which case I declare a tie :-)
>Here's my 65-byte version:
>
>n=$*[0].to_f/2
>(0-n..n).each{|x|puts" "*x.abs+"#"*(2*(n-x.abs))}
>
>
>But I have to thank you for $* -- I'd been using ARGV.
>
>My solution is pretty close to a transliteration of my
>Perl solution, which was:
>
>$n=.5*pop;print$"x abs,"#"x(2*($n-abs)),$/for(-$n..$n)
>
>
>David

I think it can be a really useful exercise in learning a language to study 
code like this - one question though.

Is there any way to step through this one substatement at a time? When run 
through the Ruby debugger the debugger wants to treat this as like 2 
logical lines which doesn't help :)

Turning trace mode on produced WAY too much information - I was hoping 
maybe to see values propagate up to the surface and be output but maybe I'm 
mis-reading the purpose of trace mode.

Any suggestions anyone?

Thanks,
-Chris