All possible ways of iterating

Ruby
1

Hey,

I am just curious as to what are all the possible methods of iterating
through a code block in ruby.

Thanks.

2

I am just curious as to what are all the possible methods of
iterating through a code block in ruby.

Ruby it a Turing complete language. There are, literally, an infinite
number of ways to do it. (Consider continuations, for example…)

– MarkusQ

3

Am Mittwoch, 02. Sep 2009, 09:20:06 +0900 schrieb Mark F.:

I am just curious as to what are all the possible methods of iterating
through a code block in ruby.

More than in APL.

Bertram

4

I am just curious as to what are all the possible methods of iterating
through a code block in ruby.

We all praise the module Enumerable now.
It is a really great module.

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Enumerable.html

5

2009/9/2 Mark F. [email protected]:

I am just curious as to what are all the possible methods of iterating
through a code block in ruby.

You do not exactly “iterate through a code block”. Instead, code
blocks are used for some of the iteration idioms in Ruby.

Btw, why do you ask?

robert

6

On Tuesday 01 September 2009 07:20:06 pm Mark F. wrote:

I am just curious as to what are all the possible methods of iterating
through a code block in ruby.

The way I think of it is, you start with while/until and for, and
while/until
can be used as a sort of ‘do while’ loop, too.

But normally, you wouldn’t use these, you’d use something like

[1,2,3].each do |x|

do something with x

end

Specifically, look up Enumerable, and blocks in general. I don’t
consider these
to be separate methods of iterating, since you could easily implement
them
like this:

class Array
def each
if block_given?
for x in self
yield x
end
else
enum_for
end
end
end

So, the language is conceptually simpler – there are at most five ways
of
iterating, depending how you count (while, do-while, until, do-until,
for).
But that’s also not entirely honest, as things in the standard library
are
often written in C for speed, even if they’re possible to write in
Ruby.
Each is no exception.

So, to answer your question, there are very few ways that are built into
the
language, though how many there are depends how you count. On the other
hand,
there are an infinite number of ways you could define yourself. For
example:

def twice
yield
yield
end

twice { puts ‘hello’ }