From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2008-09-05T16:06:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Need a 40 LOC (ignoring comments) to be shorter -- suggestions wanted

Damn this is annoying :-)

OK here's another one, this time with a recursive permutation generator. It
should be easier to modify to other variations of this problem. (However it
currently doesn't permute arrays with duplicate elements)

class Permutations
  include Enumerable

  def initialize(src)
    @data = src
  end

  def each(&blk)
    permute([], @data.to_a, &blk)
  end

  def permute(base, rest, &blk)
    if rest.empty?
      yield base
    else
      rest.each { |elem| permute(base + [elem], rest - [elem], &blk) }
    end
  end
end

p Permutations.new(3..7).
  map { |data| [data[0,3].join.to_i, data[3,2].join.to_i] }.
  min { |(a,b),(c,d)| a*b <=> c*d }