From: John <jcromartie@...>
Date: 2006-07-12T00:50:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Some questions about serious Ruby development...

Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:

> display evaluation results (like what IRB does)

I use the following method to do that:

<ruby>

def describe code
  # takes a string to be eval'ed and prints it along with showing the
return value
  sep = ' => '
  begin
    result = eval(code)
    puts code + sep + result.inspect
    return result
  rescue Exception => e
    puts code + sep + e.to_s
    return nil
  end
end

</ruby>

I then can issue the following to get a nice printout, and also get the
returned value of the statement.  Example:

<ruby> my_array = describe "Range.new(1, 5).to_a" </ruby>

Would output "Range.new(1, 5).to_a => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]" and also assign
my_array properly.