From: Ralph Grothe <ralph.grothe@...>
Date: 2007-07-24T21:26:05+09:00
Subject: Ruby Basics

Hello,

I successfully compiled and installed Ruby and Gems on this HP-UX box
(see my other thread).

Yesterday, I bought a copy of the Ruby equivalent to the Perl Camel Book
(n.b. I am coming from Perl), viz. the PickAxe Book,
and read the first couple of chapters while toying parallel a little bit
at the irb>

That's where my first question arose.
Being used to the Perl debugger for similar experiments like with irb,
the former at least offers, albeit moderate, history amenities (viz.
!cmd#, to repeat cmd No. #)
I would have expected irb to offer some readline and thus command
history support (I am a lousy typer)?

Then while reading the code examples in the PickAxe I was a little
bewildered
how the authors were merrily extending their sample classes by simply
redifinig some method to add functionality without, as I would have
expected,
first sublassing the class and then overriding single methods.

Instead it went like this

E.g.

class Noise
  def moo
    # some implementation
  end
end

# more paragraphs of text
# and then taking up again

class Noise
  def moo
    # deviating implementation from first definition
  end
end

# and so forth


I this valid (and recommnded) Ruby, or were they just
sweeping former stuff under the carpet to keep the sample code terse?

Similarily, I was puzzled that it seems to be possible to
again extend base classes like Array without being required to subclass
and override, instead doing something like

class Array
  def my_super_sort
    # implementation
  end
end

Is this really all that easy?

As for style, shouldn't Ruby class definitions just as one
class-end block go into a single file instead of these break ups?

named as the class
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