From: Calvin Bornhofen <calvin.bornhofen@...>
Date: 2013-02-02T21:01:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Enumeration vs Enumerable

Hello,

an enumerator (I hope you didn't mix enumerator and enumeration up; if 
you did, I may just have confused you more.. Sorry if that's the case), 
or iterator, is an object to traverse a collection. In ruby, you usually 
get an enumerator by calling one of enumerable's methods without a 
block. This enumerator itself provides all methods of enumerable, as 
well as some other nice functionality. It's just another way to go 
through a collection.
An example (taken from the documentation of enumerator[1]):
   %w[foo bar baz].map.with_index { |w, i| "#{i}: #{w}" }
   # => ["0: foo", "1: bar", "2: baz"]

Since there is no map_with_index function in Enumerable (or Array), we 
can't write that example as concise without an enumerator. We could, 
however, do this by hand:
   a = []
   %w[foo bar baz].each_with_index { |w, i| a << "#{i}: #{w}" }
   # a is now ["0: foo", "1: bar", "2: baz"]

To wrap all that up:
-Collection: A collection of things, can be an array, a hash, a linked 
list, a mathematical set, ... (this is a general concept implemented at 
various places in ruby)
-Enumeration: A list of all elements in a collection. Sometimes a 
collection itself is an enumeration, sometimes not (this is also a 
general concept)
-Enumerable: A module providing a huge functionality for traversing and 
manipulating collections (this is a ruby-specific thing)
-Enumerator / Iterator: An object to traverse a collection (this is a 
general concept and implemented in ruby)

I hope I could help. :)

Regards,
Calvin

On 02.02.2013 06:07, Arup Rakshit wrote:
> @calvin - Your example is good. But in this context with this example 
> how array is differing from enumerator? Thanks 

[1]: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Enumerator.html