Variable pointers

Ruby
1

I have a situation where I’m walking through an unordered sequence of
text
(splitting at newlines) looking for particular patterns. If a particular
pattern
matches then I perform some processing unique to that pattern and assign
the
output to a particular location (the location could be anything, e.g.
local
scalar, a particular array element, an instance variable, etc.).

WARNING: C syntax approaching. Please restore your seats to their
upright and
locked positions and apply seat belts.

Using “&” (take address) and “*” (de-reference pointer) from C,
conceptually
what I want to do is:

template = [
[ patternRegex, processingProc, &storage ]
…
]
textSequence.each { |line|
template.each { |tuple|
*tuple[2] = tuple[1].call(line) if line =~ tuple[0]
}
}

Obviously this could be achieved with eval() but that is very
heavyweight.

Are there other options?

It doesn’t seem that using Symbol’s will work since they’re not
addresses (and
thus can’t be de-referenced) and they’re scope-independent, i.e. if I
use :foo I
can’t distinguish between a local variable foo, a method foo(), etc.
even if
they’re not lexically visible within the current scope.

As a kludge I could change tuple[2] to be an integer that indexes into
an array
and after the main loop is finished manually scatter the array elements
to their
final locations (note the word “kludge” at the beginning). The locations
being
stored may be all over the place so collecting them in a single object
would be
difficult, no less kludgy, and would obfuscate the code.

Thanx.

Jake

2

On 06.12.2006 19:55, xyz wrote:

what I want to do is:

and after the main loop is finished manually scatter the array elements to their
final locations (note the word “kludge” at the beginning). The locations being
stored may be all over the place so collecting them in a single object would be
difficult, no less kludgy, and would obfuscate the code.

I can think of several approaches one of them being:

class Foo
INSTRUCTIONS = {
/(\d+)\s*+\s*(\d+)/ => lambda {|t, a, b| a.to_i + b.to_i},
}

def process (enum)
result = {}
enum.each do |line|
INSTRUCTIONS.each do |rx, fun|
md = rx.match(line) and result[rx] = fun[*md.to_a]
end
end
result
end
end

irb(main):051:0> Foo.new.process [“1+2”, “3”]
=> {/(\d+)\s*+\s*(\d+)/=>3}

Of course, you could use a symbol as label in INSTRUCTIONS and use that
to reference results. And then you might as well store multiple results
(if it is possible that a pattern matches multiple times).

class Foo
INSTRUCTIONS = {
:sum => [/(\d+)\s*+\s*(\d+)/, lambda {|t, a, b| a.to_i + b.to_i}],
}

def process (enum)
result = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k]=[]}
enum.each do |line|
INSTRUCTIONS.each do |label, (rx, fun)|
md = rx.match(line) and result[label] << fun[*md.to_a]
end
end
result
end
end

irb(main):087:0> Foo.new.process [“1+2”, “3”, " 4 + 4"]
=> {:sum=>[3, 8]}

You can as well hand over the MatchData instance directly to the lambda
etc. but I guess you get the picture.

Btw, that method also works with an IO instance.

Kind regards

robert
3

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In article [email protected],
xyz [email protected] wrote:

I have a situation where I’m walking through an unordered sequence of text
(splitting at newlines) looking for particular patterns. If a particular pattern
matches then I perform some processing unique to that pattern and assign the
output to a particular location (the location could be anything, e.g. local
scalar, a particular array element, an instance variable, etc.).

You are thinking in “C”, this just doesn’t work well in
Ruby. Everything in Ruby is an object and every variable is just
a pointer to that object. When you say

a = b

in Ruby, it means in C

a = &b

and

a

always evaluates to

*a

          ]

textSequence.each { |line|
template.each { |tuple|
*tuple[2] = tuple[1].call(line) if line =~ tuple[0]
}
}

Obviously this could be achieved with eval() but that is very heavyweight.

Are there other options?

Just use

tuple[2] = tuple[1].call(line) if line =~ tuple[0]

You can’t easily pass storage around in Ruby, like you can in
C. What you pass around is a pointer to an object. The
processingProc should handle the createtion of the object,
the storage item is just a name for where you store the pointer
to the object. If you are managing storage, rather than objects
you are doing things the hard way in Ruby.

_ Booker C. Bense

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