From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2007-10-26T12:03:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Skip the first invocation e.g. skip_first { foo }

On Oct 25, 2007, at 9:56 PM, Ari Brown wrote:

>
> On Oct 25, 2007, at 7:35 PM, ara.t.howard wrote:
>
>> as others have mentioned you can use the block counter that's  
>> passed - but in general i've done things like this before:
>>
>> cfp:~ > cat a.rb
>> block = lambda{ block = lambda{ puts 'foo' } }
>> 3.times{ block.call }
>>
>>
>> cfp:~ > ruby a.rb
>> foo
>> foo
>
> Whoa! That's pretty intense! Can you please explain how that works?  
> I'm totally lost to your magic.

It changes what the local variable block holds on the first call.  So  
basically, the first call is the warm-up call that builds a function  
to handle all future calls which do the real work.

James Edward Gray II