From: "Stephan Kämper" <Stephan.Kaemper@...>
Date: 2001-12-12T19:44:35+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28334] Re: Reviews solicited for Ruby article

Hi Harry,

great to see people working on articles to spread thw word!

Harry Ohlsen wrote:
> Are there any errors in the code ... or can it be written more
> clearly/succinctly, without making it hard for someone who hasn't seen
> the language before to understand?
> 
> Any suggestions on how to better explain anything?
> 
> Feel free to post comments to the newsgroup ... I'm not easily offended
> :-) ... but if you could send me an e-mail, that would be helpful,
> because then I can send you a quick message when I have newer versions.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Harry O.

Well, I'm not through the whloe thing but I've got a comment on the 
first example. Well counting the "Hello world" one it's actually the 
2nd one. You'll know what I mean anyway.

IMHO the count_uppercase could me made more rubyish like the following:

def count_uppercase( text )
    # "Initialize" the hash with 0 and you can use it right away
    # w/o the need to init each used element with 0
    counts = Hash.new(0)
    # Used an iterator here - it's more native in Ruby I think
    text.each_byte { | c |
        # Had to convert c to chr as each_byte leaves me with a Fixnum
        c = c.chr
        counts[c] += 1 if c =~ /[A-Z]/
    }

    total = 0
    # I'd prefer curly braces here, 
    # but how am I to tell what to use when?
    counts.each_pair do |key, value|
        puts "#{key} -> #{value}"
        total += value
    end
    total
end

total = count_uppercase("This is only an EXAMPLE !!")

puts "The total was #{total}"


From an oo point of view I'd prefer to change some more things
- One and only one job for each method
  Make a distinction between output and computing 
  count_uppercase shoud do what its name implies: Count the uppercase
letters
  Perhaps it should return the hash with the counting results?

- The output in count_uppercase might be refactored out of this method

Anyway, I'll be happy to see suggestions to improve what I posted.

Happy rubying!

Stephan