[ruby-talk:7744] Re: New to Ruby

[e-mail] writes:

> In article <[e-mail]>,
>   Dave Thomas <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > Congratulations.
> 
> Thank you Thomas. Now I am at page 39.  If I revise
>     Song.new('title1','artist1',1), etc
> to
>     Song.new('title1', 'artst1',1).to_s, etc

A SongList is a list of Songs, rather than a list of strings, so the
original is correct.

> and use the definition of class Song at page 19 and page 21, then it
> works.  However, is there any way to rewrite the class Song and leave
> the bottom of page 39 intact?

The code examples that you are looking at actually execute to generate
the output you see in the book, so there shouldn't be any need to
rewrite class Song--the code should be correct. Let's look at the
complete code for this example:

  class SongList
    def initialize
      @songs = Array.new
    end
    def deleteFirst
      @songs.shift
    end
    def deleteLast
      @songs.pop
    end
    def append(aSong)
      @songs.push(aSong)
      self
    end
  end  
  class Song
    def initialize(name, artist, duration)
      @name     = name
      @artist   = artist
      @duration = duration
    end
    def to_s
      "Song: #{@name}--#{@artist} (#{@duration})"
    end
  end
  list = SongList.new
  list.
    append(Song.new('title1', 'artist1', 1)).
    append(Song.new('title2', 'artist2', 2)).
    append(Song.new('title3', 'artist3', 3)).
    append(Song.new('title4', 'artist4', 4))

  list.deleteFirst
  list.deleteFirst
  list.deleteLast
  list.deleteLast
  list.deleteLast

It runs, but produces no output. In the book, when you see the arrow
after a line of Ruby code, that's pointing to the value returned by
that line. That value is normally the result of 'inspect'ing the
expression. However, this is pretty ugly for classes: if we change the 
last 5 lines above to use 'p' (which does an inspect):

   p  list.deleteFirst
   p  list.deleteFirst
   p  list.deleteLast
   p  list.deleteLast
   p  list.deleteLast

we get

   #<Song:0x4018aa3c @duration=1, @artist="artist1", @name="title1">
   #<Song:0x4018aa00 @duration=2, @artist="artist2", @name="title2">
   #<Song:0x4018a988 @duration=4, @artist="artist4", @name="title4">
   #<Song:0x4018a9c4 @duration=3, @artist="artist3", @name="title3">
   nil

which isn't pretty.[1] So for this example, we'll use #puts, which
invokes the object's to_s method:[2]

   puts  list.deleteFirst
   puts  list.deleteFirst
   puts  list.deleteLast
   puts  list.deleteLast
   puts  list.deleteLast

and we get

   Song: title1--artist1 (1)
   Song: title2--artist2 (2)
   Song: title4--artist4 (4)
   Song: title3--artist3 (3)
   nil

Just like the book (which is a relief ;-)


In this example, we were simply trying to show that the methods in
SongList were indeed returning the correct Song objects.  

I hope this helps.


Dave



Footnotes: 
[1]  And it made out lines too long

[2]  How did we do that in the book? We cheated. We overrode
#inspect in class Song to call to_s. That's because the preprocessor
that generates the typeset code fragments always uses #inspect to get
the value, so we had to change the input slightly to fool it.