From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2008-05-05T21:38:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Different Ways To Loop

Hi --

On Mon, 5 May 2008, Marc Heiler wrote:

> Hmm, the example with p *1..100 surprised me, I knew the * but I somehow
> havent seen this used in such a short way :)
>
> I guess fun examples would be that noone notices that a loop is a
> work... isn't there an obfuscated way with Array(pack/unpack)?

I think there are infinite obfuscated ways. It depends what you
consider a "way" to print the integers 1 to 100. You can surround it
with unintelligible garbage, encrypt it and then unencrypt and eval
it, and so forth.

It's an interesting question: what's the horizon of a "way" to do
something, using "way" as in "Ruby gives you different ways to do
xyz"? I don't believe that the relation between, say, p *1..100 and
puts [1,2,3,...,100] is the same as the relation between either of
those ways of printing integers and

puts [*eval("1" + (("$%#$&*."[-1,1]) * 2) +
((212-32)*5/9).to_s)].pack(%{#{"".class.class.name[0].chr}*}).unpack("#{'B'.succ}*")

or whatever. That prints the numbers but I don't think it can usefully
be described as a "way" to print an array of integers.


David

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