From: Richard Conroy <richard.conroy@...>
Date: 2010-06-23T02:52:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Help with Ruby return types and documentation

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On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 4:59 PM, Tasos Laskos <zapotek@segfault.gr> wrote:
>
> And of course I did all those things, I'm not an imbecile and I'm also
> not bashing Ruby.
>
> I'd really like not to use IRB just to figure out an inheritance
> hierarchy or the available method/attributes of an object.
>
>
Hi Tasos,
     I came from Java like yourself, so the absence of return type
documentation really
warped my head too, to start with. You really can't expect Ruby authors to
document
return types like they do in Java - a Ruby method can return anything from a
method.
In practice API writers are unlikely to be jerks about it - returned objects
tend to have
a lot of consistency.

While you may not like the IRB option, in practice it is your fastest path
to understanding.
However you should really take a look at awesome_print:

http://www.rubyinside.com/awesome_print-a-new-pretty-printer-for-your-ruby-objects-3208.html

Its a Ruby gem that puts pp (pretty print) on steroids, giving you a lot of
information about
the objects, including its inheritance hierarchy, and the tree structure of
any Collections.

There isn't really a shortcut to learning Ruby libraries. Most don't play
mindgames with
the return types. However HTML inspection APIs like nokogiri will be
returning objects
that represent complex HTML structures. I remember Hpricot being much the
same.

Its worth taking the library through IRB (and ap) for 30 minutes or so with
some test data,
to get a feel for it.

regards,
Richard.

-- 
http://richardconroy.blogspot.com

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