From: Rein Henrichs <reinh@...>
Date: 2010-06-18T12:50:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Idiomatic Printing an array with commas

On 2010-06-17 20:08:32 -0700, Chuck Brotman said:

> ".inspect", ".join", "*".  Of course, there isn't just one way to get
> the job done in Ruby!
> 
> I appreciate all the tips
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Chuck

Well, Array#inspect makes use of behavior identical to that of 
Array#join. You could* implement it as:

class Array
  def inspect
	'[' << map{|item| item.inspect}.join(', ') << ']'
  end
end

Also, Array#join and Array#* are synonyms. So there's way closer to one 
way than to many. ;)

* this naive implementation fails on recursive arrays and is less 
efficient than the one used by Rubinius**, which combines the #map and 
#join into a single #each: 
http://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/blob/master/kernel/common/array.rb#L915-926

** 

Rubinius source-diving is a great way to find out a Ruby reference 
implementation for something written in C in MRI or YARV Rubies.
-- 
Rein Henrichs
http://puppetlabs.com
http://reinh.com