From: Jason Nordwick <jason@...>
Date: 2006-09-16T00:12:19+09:00
Subject: Re: arbitrary indexes

In my original message, I asked for people not to answer "change the behavior of [] yourself" beause changing the base semantics of indexing is likely to play havoc with the other developers (we have about 5 writing with the same code) or possibly another package we import (this type of collision has already happened once to us on a relatively small project, and we had to turn off an couple inlined C method because of it).

"Change the base behavior of this builtin" and "write it in C" have become the chief dodges of the Ruby community to any substantive criticism. I now have a file I load that includes base extensions to the language that should probably be supplied by the system, and that files seems to just keep growing. Ruby is become less productive of a langauge because of it because I spend more time either searching for these functions like "values_at", writing extentions to [] or such, and then debugging them when the interactions with other parts of the system fail.


-j


MonkeeSage wrote:
> Jason Nordwick wrote:
>> Of course I don't believe that going from value_at to [] would make
>> my code faster, just that it would make it more compact. We started
>> using Ruby for some moderately heavy numerics, and I haven't been
>> able to be as concise (or productive) as I wish (or thought from what
>> others told me).
> 
> So define your own implementation! That's one of the things that makes
> working in ruby so productive.
> 
> class Array
>   def [](*args)
>     if args.size == 1
>       at(*args)
>     else
>       values_at(*args)
>     end
>   end
> end
> 
> a = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
> p a[2] # => 3
> p a[2,4,6] #=> [3, 5, 7]
> 
> Regards,
> Jordan
> 
>