Re: Ruby quick reference arranged in ASCII sequence?

Thanks for all the comments. The generosity of the folks on this forum
is amazing.

As a bonus, there seems to have been a lively discussion about "best"
code.

I fully support the honest attempts by developers to write the best
code. But in my case, I simply want to write quick one-off programs that
do the job, and might never be used again. I use whichever language
is found by google, including languages that I know nothing
about.

Here's an example. There's a Rubik's cube on this site:
http://www.schubart.net/rc/

It's an applet, so nothing can be saved. I wanted to be able to save the
"last good position" before I mess everything up. Or to simply save a
position and return to it some other day.

At that point, I hadn't written a line of java in my life. So I
contacted several java forums and asked for advice. Most replies
recommended me to read 3 java books, attend 2 courses, and get a java
qualification to at least Nobel Peace Prize level. None of the replies
gave me a list of the steps that I needed to take to save the cube.

So I contacted the developer. He advised me to change the line:

public class RubiksCubeApplet extends Applet

to

public class RubiksCube extends Panel implements Serializable

I created "Save" and "Restore" buttons by copying his code for the
"Scramble" and "Give up" buttons. There's no "Close" button because I
simply click Ctrl+C in the console.

I don't understand any of it. I still don't know what "Serializable"
means. (I feel quite guilty about that.) But it works great.

My code is so ugly that the only people who are allowed to see it are
young family members and friends who are writing their first programs.
The big reward for me is when they come back later and show me how I
should have written the code :)

Regarding my original post, the zenspider reference quoted by Bartosz
Dziewo=C5=84ski is excellent. That's how I found out what "?" means. It's=

just a C conditional statement.

In any language other than ruby, I might have recognized the combination
of "?" and ":"

But about half of ruby syntax uses ":"  so that threw me off. (There are
186 occurrences of ":" in the zenspider reference.)

I've just found out that almost all of the non-alphanumeric characters
in ruby are in the first three pages (yes, three double-column pages) of
the index for "Perl in a Nutshell". That's convenient. I can find
alphabetic references by googling. It's not so easy to google for "@",
or "::", or "~". But Eric Christopherson's link to symbolhound looks
very useful.

Many thanks for all the help, including those whose name I might not
have mentioned :)

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