From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2001-07-27T06:19:16+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18598] Re: My first Ruby program... :-)

Hello --

On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, Bjorn Pettersen wrote:

> Well, it's now two days into playing with Ruby, and I wrote my first
> non-trivial program (it's converting a large c++ enum to constants). I'm
> still shaky on idiomatic usage, so if any of the initiated would care to
> comment on coding style I would be very grateful.

I used your program as an excuse to explore class Matrix a little
more.  I don't have any strong recommendation about whether to use
Matrix for your purposes, though it might keep things manageable if
your program grows.  Then again, at least in this version, there's a
fair amount of flipping among types, which probably slows it down.
(Optimizations and streamlinings are welcome :-)

Anyway, for your hacking pleasure, here is a Matrix-based rewrite.
Note that creating a matrix involves a call to #[] -- for example,
m = Matrix[ [1,2], [3,4] ].)


   require 'matrix'

   class Array
     def rpad
       m = map {|e| e.to_s.size} .max + 1
       dup.map do |e|
	 e.to_s.ljust(m)
       end
     end
   end

   class StringTable < Matrix
     def to_s
       res = ""
       m = (0...column_size).map do |n|
	 column(n).to_a.rpad
       end
       type[*m].transpose.to_a.each do |r|
	 res << r.join + "\n"
       end
       res
     end
   end

   def test1
     lst = [ %w{ This is a hack of the },
	     %w{ program which Bjorn put on the },
	     %w{ Ruby mailing list earlier this afternoon.} ]
     puts StringTable[*lst]
   end

   test1


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav