From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2007-06-12T03:58:21+09:00
Subject: Re: a matter of style

On 6/11/07, Bas van Gils <bas@van-gils.org> wrote:
>
> All,
>
> A little while ago I picked up a copy of the pickaxe book and got hooked to
> Ruby. Never had a `real' project to work on though (that's what you get when
> you don't hack for a living I suppose :-). Either way, a few weeks back I
> needed an app that generates deals for the card game bridge. I made a small
> design and hacked up some unit tests. After a while no more tests failed:
>
>     bas@Librarian { ~/bridgehands }$ ruby bridgeTests.rb
>     Loaded suite bridgeTests
>     Started
>     ....
>     Finished in 0.003154 seconds.
>
> After a bit more coding to format the output I got something that outputs:
>
>     bas@Librarian { ~/bridgehands }$ ruby deal.rb
>             AQJ652
>             92
>             T53
>             Q5
>     973                 4
>     K87653              AQJ
>     8                   J742
>     JT4                 A9876
>             KT8
>             T4
>             AKQ96
>             K32
Do not forget to unblock the Ten of Diamonds in your 4 Spades ;)
>
> Not bad... Like I said, I'm not a full-time programmer. I would *love* to
> learn more about `proper' ruby style though. Is there even such a thing? I
> mean, the book cover said something about *pragmatic* :-)
>
> Could anyone have a look at:
>
>     http://www.van-gils.org/~bas/bridgehands/

Some thaughts
(*) why do you define Player#setName! an attribute accessor to :name
seems appropriate
(*) Card = Struct.new( :suit, :face ) would be sufficent
(*) Ruby allows for much shorter code, look e.g at
 def getCard
    if @cards.size == 0
      raise "No more cards in the deck"
    end
    return @cards.slice!(0)
  end
which I would write as
  def getCard;
     @cards.shift or raise SomeNiceErrorClass, "No more cards in the deck"
  end
(+) An example where you are in harmony with ruby is:
def cardsOfSuit(sn)
    return @cards.select{ |card| card.suit.name==sn }
 end
The return however is superfluous, but it is a respectable style to
end all defs with return statements

(*) Personally I think it is nice to name CardSet#shuffle! with the
"!". However more learned members of the community think that the
existance of X#member! implies
X#member and X#member  is to be defined as

def member; x = dup; x.member!; x end

Just to let you know, I am with you but we are pretty alone ;)

All at all pretty impressive for a beginner.

Cheers
Robert
>
> and give me some suggestions on style / ruby idiom / other things?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated,
>
> yours
>
>   Bas
>
> --
> Bas van Gils <bas@van-gils.org>, http://www.van-gils.org
> [[[ Thank you for not distributing my E-mail address ]]]
>
Robert

-- 
You see things; and you say Why?
But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?
-- George Bernard Shaw