[ruby-talk:8337] Re: Stuck on p40 of Programming Ruby

John Rubinubi <[e-mail]> writes:

> I'm sure I'm annoying everybody with my stupid questions. I'm
> sorry. Now I'm hung up on getting something to run with def [] (key)
> in it. Could anybody please give me a simple example and
> explanation?  Something that will run without lines and lines of
> 'hidden code'--I couldn't get the downloaded p40 stuff to run but
> it's more than I wanted anyway, I think.

[] is just like any other method, but conventionally it's used for
indexing operations. A different example might be

  module Alphabet
    def Alphabet.[](position)
      return (?A + position - 1).chr
    end
  end

  Alphabet[1]    #=> "A"
  Alphabet[26]   #=> "Z"

It's difficult to do something more meaningful without implementing a
collection.

I just tried the downloaded page 40 code and it ran OK for me. I had
to change the list[...] lines to have them actually output the
result. What problems are you seeing (I need to et this source code
stuff sorted out).

Thanks


Dave