[ruby-talk:7705] Code sample for improvement

During an idle chat with someone on IRC, they presented some fairly
nasty code for printing a time interval in English. I cleaned it up
a bit and converted it to Ruby.

  #! /usr/bin/env ruby

  # Given the number of seconds, convert to English description

  def format(size, singular, plural)
    if size > 0
      (size == 1) ? "#{size} #{singular} " : "#{size} #{plural} "
    else
      ""
    end
  end

  time = ARGV[0].to_i

  secs   = time % 60; time = time / 60
  mins   = time % 60; time = time / 60
  hours  = time % 24; time = time / 24
  days   = time % 30; time = time / 30
  months = time % 12; time = time / 12
  years  = time

  res = ""
  res += format(years,  'year',  'years')
  res += format(months, 'month', 'months')
  res += format(days,   'day',   'days')
  res += format(hours,  'hour',  'hours')
  res += format(mins,   'min',   'mins')
  res += format(secs,   'sec',   'secs')

  puts res

Example run:

  [steve@localhost steve]$ ./a 10000
  2 hours 46 mins 40 secs 

I was interested in how the new constructs available in Ruby, like
closures and co-routines, could help clean up what really is pretty
ghastly code.

I've played around with a few other approaches, but nothing really
seems to stand out as being a better way of doing things.

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