[ruby-talk:7259] Re: Replacing nils in arrays?

In article <91bg97$h5r$[e-mail]>,  <[e-mail]> wrote:
>Question for you all.
>
>Suppose you have an array that is growing
>more or less unpredictably. You assign an
>element that is past the current end, and
>you get several new nils as a result.
>
>My problem: I want to store zeroes, not
>nils.
>
>What I wish (though I'm not advocating an
>actual change in Ruby) is to be able to
>specify a default value for "new but un-
>assigned" elements, much as you can give
>a default value for a hash.
>
>However, I don't want to manually keep
>track of when the array gets bigger; I
>don't like the option of periodically
>scanning it from beginning to end; and
>waiting for the array to be completely
>built is not an option.
>
>How would you recommend doing this?

One straightforward technique would be to
define your own insertion/access/delete methods
which perform the necessary substitions/checks,
and interact with arrays through those functions.

-= Josh