From: Morton Goldberg <m_goldberg@...>
Date: 2007-02-20T11:11:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange question: Convert string to array name

On Feb 19, 2007, at 8:10 PM, kenbo wrote:

> Thanks for the folks that mentioned eval---I thought of that after the
> posting but assumed that, as in LISP, there might be a better way  
> to accomplish
> it :-)
>
> It's nice to see more similarities between LISP and Ruby.

I don't know whether or not you will think this better than using  
'eval', but in Ruby this kind of indirect reference problem can often  
be handled by introducing a hash. For example,

<code>
a = %w{ one two three four five }
b = %w{ six seven eight nine }
h = {}
h['a'] = a
h['b'] = b
foo = 'a'
h[foo][2] # => "three"
foo = 'b'
h[foo][2] # => "eight"
</code>

Regards, Morton