From: John Carter <john.carter@...>
Date: 2009-01-16T08:02:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Point free (pointless) programming in ruby?

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Brian Candler wrote:

>> 1) Is there a neater way of expressing a sequence of function
>>     compositions in Ruby?
>
> Maybe you could define an Array#to_proc. e.g.
>
> class Array
>  def to_proc
>    lambda { |src| inject(src) { |memo,proc| proc[memo] } }
>  end
> end

> p src.map(&[method(:a), method(:b)])

Cool! I had to spend a bit of time rereading the ri docs and playing
with irb to work out what you were doing... :-) ...but very cool
nevertheless.

Ooh.. I bet somebody could...
   a) Win an obfuscated programming contest...
   b) Do something very very cool and surprisingly useful..
with the stuff.

Basically what I'm seeing here is Ruby is actually a superset of the
concatenative languages. If you stick within a strict subset of Ruby
you can do the almost magical rewrite algebras that you can do in
something like Joy..

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy/j07rrs.html

John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch                Email : john.carter@tait.co.nz
New Zealand