From: "T. Onoma" <transami@...>
Date: 2003-12-06T13:39:09+09:00
Subject: Re: rubynuby code critique request

On Saturday 06 December 2003 03:12 am, Jeff Dickens wrote:
> I tried using the wiki at rubygarden.org but it just made a mess...
> probably not designed for things this big.
>
> Anyhow, here's a (longish) program I've written as my first "real" ruby
> program.  I'm reading from the "Programming Ruby" book at rubycentral.com,
> and what do you know, I actually do have a jukebox of sorts.  Actually it's
> a radio station I do some work for.  So I expanded the example code some.
> Have a look and poke some holes.

I think you're right, this is a little more than the intended use of the Wiki 
NubyCodeCritique ;-)

Well, I'd say you've done dang well. I only noticed a few places you could be 
more concise, but nothing of major significance. At least as far as I can 
tell from just looking it over briefly. It works I take it? That's the most 
important thing! :-) Beyond that you may wish to explore a bit of unit 
testing.

A few quick spot suggestions:

You might want to put more of the string cleanup in the parsing of the file 
rather than the append method. Also in parsing a file like this all \s+ 
spaces can be reduced to a single space (as it stands it looks like you'll 
still retain multiple spaces in between strings). So try .gsub(/\s+/,' ') on 
the file as it is read in.

It seems like you prefer "word" methods, but it is possible to do stuff like:

 class ArtistIndex
   def initialize
     @aindex = Hash.new(nil)
   end
   # instead of def aindex (anObject, artist)
   def []=(anObject, artist)
     @aindex[artist] = [] if @aindex[artist].nil?
     @aindex[artist].push(anObject)
   end
   # instead of def alookup(artist)
   def [](artist)
     @aindex[artist]
   end
   # if it were me i'd just call this #artists
   def listartists
     @aindex.keys.sort
   end
 end

These make it work like a Hash, which it essentially is. In fact you could 
subclass Hash:

  class ArtistIndex < Hash
     ...
    def listartists
      self.keys.sort
    end
  end

And then you'd get all the abilites of hash as well, though this might be more 
than you need/want.

My two bits, HTH,
T.