From: Sean O'Dell <sean@...>
Date: 2002-03-28T07:10:09+09:00
Subject: Proc/Method objects are great

Just thought I would share something I just did with Ruby that I thought was
really something.  Probably a bit boring for some of you.

I have a group of Ruby scripts that get called by a main script, and instead
of just running them like stand-alone scripts, I wanted to somehow "load"
them and then call a known method (known by name) in each script at certain
points in the main script.  The scripts themselves are part of a modular
system, and the main script really doesn't know too much about what they do,
so it was important that I be able to add/remove scripts from this system
without having to fiddle around with the main script that calls them.

The way I ended up handling this was using "require" to load the scripts
once, if needed, then using .method("") to obtain a module method which is
provided by each script, storing the method object in an array, which I then
call several times later.

This allowed the main script to set up a more complex environment that the
individual scripts have direct access to, as well as providing a library of
functions the scripts themselves can rely on, making them very tidy and
containing only a minimal amount of code to just perform their tasks.

Allowing the use of "require" in regular code was a good idea, but being
able to call a method through its associated object which was obtained using
a call to .method("") which provided the object using its string name as a
lookup...that was just a great idea, Matz.

This is a truly amazing language sometimes.  I have yet to experience a
situation where I can't solve a problem the way I think is the most natural
way to solve it using Ruby...it's just being very good to me.

    Sean