From: Farrel Lifson <farrel.lifson@...>
Date: 2006-03-17T22:04:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Card tricks with Ruby

I think you're confusing the <=> operator needed to mixin Enumerable.

The block in sort_by just returns a value that the sort_by method
should assign to each element in the array so that they may be
ordered. The returned value itself could be anything as long as it
implements Comparable (or it might just need <=>). So for instance
when you say

deck.sort_by do |card|
  card.suite
end

the sort_by method get's all the values of the suites of the cards in
the deck and then sorts them according to that. The suite could be a
string ("Hearts") or a numeric value (0=Hearts, 1=Diamonds etc). For
instance

[1,2,3,4].sort_by do |number|
  number % 2
end

will return [4,2,3,1]. Because the value of the block can either be 0
or 1 the array is sorted into two 'chunks': 4 & 2 (number % 2 ==0)  1
& 3 (number % 2 == 1).

Farrel