Fun with ranges!

Ruby
1

So I was messing around today trying to find out whether there was a
viable way to cram unbounded lists into the Range implementation when
I stumbled on this…

irb(main):001:0> inf = 1.0/0.0
=> Infinity

irb(main):002:0> 1…inf
=> 1…Infinity

Hoorah! But not just that.

irb(main):003:0> ‘a’…inf
=> “a”…Infinity

Hold on a second, I said to myself, that doesn’t make any sense… inf
is a Float and “a” is a string! That’s when I discovered ruby’s
dastardly secret:

irb(main):004:0> ‘a’ <=> 3
=> false
irb(main):005:0> 3 <=> ‘a’
=> nil

And hence:

irb(main):006:0> ‘a’…3
=> “a”…3
irb(main):007:0> 3…‘a’
ArgumentError: bad value for range
from (irb):7

Zounds,

Sam

2

Hi –

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, Sam G. wrote:

Hoorah! But not just that.
irb(main):005:0> 3 <=> ‘a’
=> nil

And hence:

irb(main):006:0> ‘a’…3
=> “a”…3
irb(main):007:0> 3…‘a’
ArgumentError: bad value for range
from (irb):7

What version of Ruby are you using?

$ ruby -ve ‘“a”…3’
ruby 1.8.3 (2005-09-21) [powerpc-darwin8.3.0]
-e:1: warning: useless use of … in void context
-e:1: bad value for range (ArgumentError)

David

3

On 11/26/05, David A. Black [email protected] wrote:

What version of Ruby are you using?

$ ruby -ve ‘“a”…3’
ruby 1.8.3 (2005-09-21) [powerpc-darwin8.3.0]
-e:1: warning: useless use of … in void context
-e:1: bad value for range (ArgumentError)

C:>ruby -ve ‘“a”…3’
ruby 1.8.2 (2005-02-01) [i386-mswin32]
-e:1: warning: useless use of … in void context

Strange…

weill samg$ ruby -ve ‘“a”…3’
ruby 1.8.0 (2003-08-04) [i686-linux]
-e:1: warning: useless use of … in void context
-e:1: bad value for range (ArgumentError)

Double-strange… I wonder if it’s a windows thing or a version thing
(and if so why it only pops up somewhere between 1.8.0 and 1.8.3).

Sam

4

Hi –

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, Sam G. wrote:

-e:1: warning: useless use of … in void context

Strange…

weill samg$ ruby -ve ‘“a”…3’
ruby 1.8.0 (2003-08-04) [i686-linux]
-e:1: warning: useless use of … in void context
-e:1: bad value for range (ArgumentError)

Double-strange… I wonder if it’s a windows thing or a version thing
(and if so why it only pops up somewhere between 1.8.0 and 1.8.3).

Interesting – it seems to be a 1.8.2 thing.

David