From: Jacob Fugal <lukfugl@...>
Date: 2006-07-22T00:41:23+09:00
Subject: Re: opacity of magic enumerator (was: Re: Using .each with constructors)

On 7/21/06, transfire@gmail.com <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
> But why does #times return the receiver in the first place? That can't
> possible be anywhere near as useful as the alternative.... Just return
> the collection.

The primary reason I can see is that Fixnum#times is frequently used
with a fairly large valued receiver. Such as in benchmarking:

  10000.times{ ... }

Do you really want that to generate a 10000 element array? Probably
not. I too can see (and desire) the utility of a returned collection,
but we lose the beauty of Fixnum#times as a replacement for the purely
incremental while loop.

Jacob Fugal