From: schneik@...
Date: 2000-06-06T05:16:22-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:03120] Re: Min and max?



Hi,

Aleksi writes,

# Should we have min and max routines somewhere in the core Ruby
(additionally
# to the ones defined in Enumerable)?
...
# Actually I can't say min(a,b) is much more beautiful compared to
[a,b].min()
# but at least you don't have to know anything about arrays when using it
and
# I expect it to be faster.
#
# Maybe the implementation should include the block version allowing c =
# min(a,b){|a,b| a.foo() < b.bar()}.
#
# Well, there's at least one point to consider with the Kernel version.
Kernel
# is maybe not the right place for min since not all classes have
meaningful
# comparisons. So maybe Comparable is the place (or maybe not).

Well, I'll vote for that--I would like max/min routines; I don't like
reinventing wheels, especially commonly used ones. Comparable is where I'd
expect to find them.

I would also like the standard, pre-computer, most-often-desired (by me at
least) sort of sort added core Ruby as well (i.e. dictionary sort as well
as the weird Unix sort of directory name sort that puts all capital letters
before lower case letters) so I don't have to recall and invoke some sort
of overly-Perl-like idiomatic kludge.

So in addition to this:

    # ruby -e 'print ["computer ","Boston ", "Austin ", "another "].sort,
"\n"'
    Austin Boston another computer

which isn't what I normally want, I would like to do this:

    # ruby -e 'print ["computer ","Boston ", "Austin ", "another
"].dict_sort, "\n"'
   another Austin Boston computer

which is typically much more suitable for human-oriented report output, at
least when vertically rendered.

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)