From: Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@...>
Date: 2007-07-10T23:49:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Beautiful Code : Pity he didn't ask here...

On Jul 10, 2007, at 5:11 AM, Daniel Martin wrote:

> As James said, I'm going to have to disagree on this, though I'd clean
> it up to:
>
> article_pattern = \
>   %r{GET /ongoing/When/\d\d\dx/(\d\d\d\d/\d\d/\d\d/[^ .]+) }
> ARGF.each_line do |line|
>   line.scan(article_pattern) do |article,|
>     puts article
>   end
> end
>
> Look, no global variables!

Yep, much better, I wish I'd done it that way.

> I agree with your use of Hash.new(0), but disagree that it's mere
> personal preference - it's much more common to use even the single
> argument form in the constructor than to use default=.

Why?  default= makes it more obvious what you're doing.  I think it's  
better practice.

>> Example 4.5 looks like a poster child for the Hash.new block  
>> approach...
>
> Agreed.  I wonder if perhaps he's spent more time in python or some
> other dynamic language than Ruby.

Perl :)

  -Tim