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What I Love About Ruby

The document lists several features that the author loves about the Ruby programming language, including the simplicity of creating accessor and mutator methods, concise syntax for conditional initialization, support for numeric constants with thousands separators, easy integration with shell commands, logical syntax for ranges and iteration, ability to specify arrays and hashes as literals and iterate over them, use of blocks to automatically close resources, clean syntax, support for regular expressions, and built-in methods for common string operations.

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29 views4 pages

What I Love About Ruby

The document lists several features that the author loves about the Ruby programming language, including the simplicity of creating accessor and mutator methods, concise syntax for conditional initialization, support for numeric constants with thousands separators, easy integration with shell commands, logical syntax for ranges and iteration, ability to specify arrays and hashes as literals and iterate over them, use of blocks to automatically close resources, clean syntax, support for regular expressions, and built-in methods for common string operations.

Uploaded by

Iam Gupit
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Keith Bennett : What I Love About Ruby

This page last changed on Sep 17, 2008 by kbennett.

What I Love About Ruby


Keith Bennett kbennett .at. bbsinc .dot. biz

Simplicity of Creating Instance Variables with Accessors and Mutators in Ruby


class Y attr_accessor :a end

...creates an instance variable a, and an accessor and mutator.

Concise Idiom for Conditional (and Lazy) Initialization


@var ||= some_expensive_initialization

...means if var is undefined, define it, and if nil, do the initialization.

Numeric Constants Thousands Separators Supported


irb(main):002:0> 1_000_000 => 1000000 irb(main):003:0> 1_000_000.class => Fixnum

Actually, all underscores are stripped, even if they do not separate thousands.

Shell Integration A shell command enclosed in backticks will be run, and the value returned by the backticked command will be the text the command sent to stdout:
irb(main):008:0> => "" irb(main):009:0> => "" irb(main):010:0> => "./a\n./c\n" irb(main):011:0> ./a ./c => nil `mkdir a b c d` `touch b/foo d/foo` emptydirs = `find . -type d -empty` puts emptydirs

Logical Syntax:
1.upto(10) { |i| puts i } (100..200).each { |n| puts n }

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vs., in Java, for the first example:


for (int i = 0; i <= 10; i++) { System.out.println(i) ; }

Ability to Specify Arrays (and Hashes) as Literals and the Ease of Iterating Over Them
irb(main):018:0> ['collie', 'labrador', 'husky'].each { |breed| puts "Hi, I'm a #{breed}, and I know how to bark." } Hi, I'm a collie, and I know how to bark. Hi, I'm a labrador, and I know how to bark. Hi, I'm a husky, and I know how to bark. => ["collie", "labrador", "husky"]

Also:
%w(collie labrador husky)

can be used to create the array instead of:


['collie', 'labrador', 'husky']
A Hash:

irb(main):063:0> favorites = { :fruit => :durian, :vegetable => :broccoli } => {:fruit=>:durian, :vegetable=>:broccoli}

Ranges
water_liquid_range = 32.0...212.0 => 32.0...212.0 irb(main):010:0> water_liquid_range.include? 40 => true irb(main):011:0> water_liquid_range.include? -40 => false

Note: Ranges are not arrays; any number n, not just integers, such that 32.0 <= n < 212.0, is included in the range.

Converting Ranges to Arrays:

irb(main):043:0> ('m'..'q').to_a => ["m", "n", "o", "p", "q"]

Blocks Used to Automatically Close Resources


File.open 'x.txt', 'w' do |file| file << 'Hello, world'

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end

The file is automatically closed after the block completes. If no block is provided, then the open function returns the file instance:
irb(main):001:0> => #<File:x.txt> irb(main):002:0> => #<File:x.txt> irb(main):003:0> => nil irb(main):004:0> Pleaaase, delete => nil f = File.open 'x.txt', 'w' f << "Pleaaase, delete me, let me go..." f.close puts IO.read('x.txt') me, let me go...

Simple File Operations


file_as_lines_array = IO.readlines 'x.txt' file_as_single_string = IO.read 'x.txt'

Clean and Simple Syntax


puts Array.instance_methods.sort

Regular Expressions
irb(main):027:0> => 0 irb(main):028:0> => nil irb(main):029:0> => nil irb(main):030:0> => 0 'ruby' =~ /ruby/ 'rubx' =~ /ruby/ 'ruby' =~ /Ruby/ 'ruby' =~ /Ruby/i

Arrays:
irb(main):001:0> nums = [1,2,3,4,5] => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] irb(main):006:0> nums.include? 3 => true irb(main):004:0> nums.collect { |n| n * n } => [1, 4, 9, 16, 25] irb(main):002:0> nums.reject { |n| n % 2 == 0} => [1, 3, 5] irb(main):003:0> nums.inject { |sum,n| sum += n } => 15 irb(main):052:0\* distances_in_miles = [10, 50]=> [10, 50] irb(main):053:0> distances_in_km = distances_in_miles.map { |n| n * 9.0 / 5.0 } => [18.0, 90.0]irb(main):016:0\* twos = (0..10).map { |n| n * 2 } => [0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20] irb(main):017:0> fours = (0..5).map { |n| n * 4 } => [0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20] irb(main):018:0> twos - fours => [2, 6, 10, 14, 18] irb(main):019:0> twos & fours

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=> [0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20] irb(main):020:0> fours * 2 => [0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20] irb(main):021:0> twos + fours => [0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20]

Built-in String Operations Case Conversions, Capitalization Left, Right, Sub Strip, Justify, Center Search and Replace (gsub) Insert, Delete

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