From: Robert Klemme Date: 2011-11-05T22:24:53+09:00 Subject: Re: What happens in dual sorts with nil values? On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Wayne Brissette wrote: > > On Nov 4, 2011, at 6:11 PM, Robert Klemme wrote: >>> and second, am I fooling myself into thinking that I'm sorting on a.age when it's not the first sort value? >> >> You're not fooling yourself.  But the order determines the precedence. >> The second field is only evaluated if the first fields are equal and >> so forth. > > Thanks. I wasn't sure if it failed and since the first sort was done just didn't put up the error message, thus not really working. But I suspect since the only time it's coming into play is when signals, in my case, have the same name so it moves onto their signal value (AB[0], AB[1] … AB[10], etc. ) … what I was doing was creating a new array in the method that held the numbers so AB[10] didn't get placed after AB[1] in the sort. I was still running into issues during the sort, then I realized my error yesterday, I wasn't changing the numbers I was pulling out of the brackets from strings to numbers. Now that I've done that my sort list works perfectly. Good! As a side note: often people new to Ruby seem to try to work with only the basic types (String, Fixnum, Array, Hash) as is. Once they make the step to defining their own types with proper methods things usually become simpler and better structured. I think this is the moment when they truly embrace OO and cross the border from procedural style programming to OO programming. So by defining Structs for your data you have crossed the Rubikon already. :-) > As I work my way down the road with Ruby, I can't believe I stayed away from OOP for so long. I've had a bit of a hard time wrapping my brain around a few concepts, but some of the cool things I've started to do with it are saving me tons of time and coding. :)   -- When I was first exposed to OO (back in the times of Turbo Pascal 5.5) it took my quite some time to grasp those concepts, too. Now it has become second nature and feels like the most natural thing to do in programming. I think that's a normal learning experience. > So folks, if I ask what seem like idiotic questions from time to time, it's probably because I keep falling back to old habits of how I would have done things instead of how an OOP language handles things. No worries, we'll put you back on track. ;-) > Thanks everybody for your suggestions on this one. You're welcome! Kind regards robert -- remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/