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Ruby Programming
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Numbers

Ruby supports integers and floating point numbers. Integers can be any length (up to a maximum determined by the amount of free memory on your system). Integers within a certain range (normally -230 to 230-1 or -262 to 262-1) are held internally in binary form, and are objects of class Fixnum. Integers outside this range are stored in objects of class Bignum (currently implemented as a variable-length set of short integers). This process is transparent, and Ruby automatically manages the conversion back and forth.

num = 8
7.times do
  print num.type, " ", num, "\n"
  num *= num
end
produces:
Fixnum 8
Fixnum 64
Fixnum 4096
Fixnum 16777216
Bignum 281474976710656
Bignum 79228162514264337593543950336
Bignum 6277101735386680763835789423207666416102355444464034512896

You write integers using an optional leading sign, an optional base indicator (0 for octal, 0x for hex, or 0b for binary), followed by a string of digits in the appropriate base. Underscore characters are ignored in the digit string.

123456                    # Fixnum
123_456                   # Fixnum (underscore ignored)
-543                      # Negative Fixnum
123_456_789_123_345_789   # Bignum
0xaabb                    # Hexadecimal
0377                      # Octal
-0b101_010                # Binary (negated)

You can also get the integer value corresponding to an ASCII character or escape sequence by preceding it with a question mark. Control and meta combinations can also be generated using ?\C-x, ?\M-x, and ?\M-\C-x. The control version of a value is the same as ``value & 0x9f''. The meta version of a value is ``value | 0x80''. Finally, the sequence ?\C-? generates an ASCII delete, 0177.

?a                        # character code
?\n                       # code for a newline (0x0a)
?\C-a                     # control a = ?A & 0x9f = 0x01
?\M-a                     # meta sets bit 7
?\M-\C-a                  # meta and control a
?\C-?                     # delete character

A numeric literal with a decimal point and/or an exponent is turned into a Float object, corresponding to the native architecture's double data type. You must follow the decimal point with a digit, as 1.e3 tries to invoke the method e3 in class Fixnum.

All numbers are objects, and respond to a variety of messages (listed in full starting on pages 290, 313, 315, 323, and 349). So, unlike (say) C++, you find the absolute value of a number by writing aNumber.abs, not abs(aNumber).

Integers also support several useful iterators. We've seen one already---7.times in the code example on page 47. Others include upto and downto, for iterating up and down between two integers, and step, which is more like a traditional for loop.

3.times        { print "X " }
1.upto(5)      { |i| print i, " " }
99.downto(95)  { |i| print i, " " }
50.step(80, 5) { |i| print i, " " }
produces:
X X X 1 2 3 4 5 99 98 97 96 95 50 55 60 65 70 75 80

Finally, a warning for Perl users. Strings that contain numbers are not automatically converted into numbers when used in expressions. This tends to bite most often when reading numbers from a file. The following code (probably) doesn't do what was intended.

DATA.each do |line|
  vals = line.split    # split line, storing tokens in val
  print vals[0] + vals[1], " "
end

Feed it a file containing

3 4
5 6
7 8

and you'll get the output ``34 56 78.'' What happened?

The problem is that the input was read as strings, not numbers. The plus operator concatenates strings, so that's what we see in the output. To fix this, use the String#to_i method to convert the string to an integer.

DATA.each do |line|
  vals = line.split
  print vals[0].to_i + vals[1].to_i, " "
end
produces:
7 11 15
Ruby Programming
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