From: Ben Ben <argh@...>
Date: 2009-12-26T05:55:11+09:00
Subject: Making a counter for each word's occurrences in a string

By looking at this method below, I couldn't understand a few things.
Let me list the method first!

1) def count_frequency(word_list)
2)   counts = Hash.new(0)
3)   for word in word_list
4)     counts[word] += 1
5)   end
6)   counts
7) end

p count_frequency(["sparky", "the", "cat", "sat", "on", "the", "mat"])

----
that code above produces {"sparky" => 1, "the" => 2, "cat"=>1, "on"=>1,
"mat"=>1}

What I don't understand is that why line 6 is there.  OK, like 4, it
seems counts[word] combines to pin point which word and add 1 to the
counter of that word, right?  Because I'm confuse how ruby works as it's
so compact and nice, and under the hood I have no idea.  So line 2 is to
create an empty hash with 0 item and deposits as counts (object)?  Using
for loop to go through each word in word_list, adding 1 to counts[word],
but I thought counts[word] produces a position of a word and not a
counter.  OK, you can say I'm completely confused about the whole code
above.

Help?

Thanks in advance.
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