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Ruby Programming
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Implementing Iterators

A Ruby iterator is simply a method that can invoke a block of code. At first sight, a block in Ruby looks just like a block in C, Java, or Perl. Unfortunately, in this case looks are deceiving---a Ruby block is a way of grouping statements, but not in the conventional way.

First, a block may appear only in the source adjacent to a method call; the block is written starting on the same line as the method's last parameter. Second, the code in the block is not executed at the time it is encountered. Instead, Ruby remembers the context in which the block appears (the local variables, the current object, and so on), and then enters the method. This is where the magic starts.

Within the method, the block may be invoked, almost as if it were a method itself, using the yield statement. Whenever a yield is executed, it invokes the code in the block. When the block exits, control picks back up immediately after the yield.[Programming-language buffs will be pleased to know that the keyword yield was chosen to echo the yield function in Liskov's language CLU, a language that is over 20 years old and yet contains features that still haven't been widely exploited by the CLU-less.] Let's start with a trivial example.

def threeTimes
  yield
  yield
  yield
end
threeTimes { puts "Hello" }
produces:
Hello
Hello
Hello

The block (the code between the braces) is associated with the call to the method threeTimes. Within this method, yield is called three times in a row. Each time, it invokes the code in the block, and a cheery greeting is printed. What makes blocks interesting, however, is that you can pass parameters to them and receive values back from them. For example, we could write a simple function that returns members of the Fibonacci series up to a certain value.[The basic Fibonacci series is a sequence of integers, starting with two 1's, in which each subsequent term is the sum of the two preceding terms. The series is sometimes used in sorting algorithms and in analyzing natural phenomena.]

def fibUpTo(max)
  i1, i2 = 1, 1        # parallel assignment
  while i1 <= max
    yield i1
    i1, i2 = i2, i1+i2
  end
end
fibUpTo(1000) { |f| print f, " " }
produces:
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987

In this example, the yield statement has a parameter. This value is passed to the associated block. In the definition of the block, the argument list appears between vertical bars. In this instance, the variable f receives the value passed to the yield, so the block prints successive members of the series. (This example also shows parallel assignment in action. We'll come back to this on page 75.) Although it is common to pass just one value to a block, this is not a requirement; a block may have any number of arguments. What happens if a block has a different number of parameters than are given to the yield? By a staggering coincidence, the rules we discuss under parallel assignment come into play (with a slight twist: multiple parameters passed to a yield are converted to an array if the block has just one argument).

Parameters to a block may be existing local variables; if so, the new value of the variable will be retained after the block completes. This may lead to unexpected behavior, but there is also a performance gain to be had by using variables that already exist.[For more information on this and other ``gotchas,'' see the list beginning on page 127; more performance information begins on page 128.]

A block may also return a value to the method. The value of the last expression evaluated in the block is passed back to the method as the value of the yield. This is how the find method used by class Array works.[The find method is actually defined in module Enumerable, which is mixed into class Array.] Its implementation would look something like the following.

class Array
  def find
    for i in 0...size
      value = self[i]
      return value if yield(value)
    end
    return nil
  end
end
[1, 3, 5, 7, 9].find {|v| v*v > 30 } 7

This passes successive elements of the array to the associated block. If the block returns true, the method returns the corresponding element. If no element matches, the method returns nil. The example shows the benefit of this approach to iterators. The Array class does what it does best, accessing array elements, leaving the application code to concentrate on its particular requirement (in this case, finding an entry that meets some mathematical criteria).

Some iterators are common to many types of Ruby collections. We've looked at find already. Two others are each and collect. each is probably the simplest iterator---all it does is yield successive elements of its collection.

[ 1, 3, 5 ].each { |i| puts i }
produces:
1
3
5

The each iterator has a special place in Ruby; on page 85 we'll describe how it's used as the basis of the language's for loop, and starting on page 102 we'll see how defining an each method can add a whole lot more functionality to your class for free.

Another common iterator is collect, which takes each element from the collection and passes it to the block. The results returned by the block are used to construct a new array. For instance:

["H", "A", "L"].collect { |x| x.succ } ["I", "B", "M"]

Ruby Programming
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