From: Colin Bartlett <colinb2r@...>
Date: 2010-07-12T01:58:07+09:00
Subject: Re: What is meant by those lines of code in this script?

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On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Abder-rahman Ali <
abder.rahman.ali@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Regarding this part:
>
> sentence[open..close] = '' if close
>
> You explained what it means, but I just want to ask, what is ---> if
> close?
>
You can modify a statment with "if" or "unless".
A short *almost* (but not quite) accurate statement is that it is a
shorthand way of writing:

if close
  sentence[open..close] = ''
end

# or

if close then
  sentence[open..close] = ''
end

There's a fuller explanation here:
http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_expressions.html
at "If and Unless Modifiers"

You can also use "while" and "until" as statement modifiers(see Loops
further down that page), but there is, as Programming Ruby says, a
"wrinkle":
"There's one wrinkle when while and until are used as statement modifiers.
If the statement they are modifying is a begin/end block, the code in the
block will always execute at least one time, regardless of the value of the
boolean expression."

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