Ruby, a message to you

I’ve read around the internet that at RailsConfEurope, Dr. Nic used my baby GuessMethod as an example of fun that can be had with meta-programming. I’m flattered.

But flattery only lasts so long, and before I knew it I remembered that I had been wanting to fix it up a little. So I did.

As such, I’m pleased to announce version 0.1 of my little aggressive spelling corrector for irb.

sudo gem install guessmethod

And live the life!

003:0> Strin.tos
attention: replacing non-existant constant Strin with String for Object
attention: sending to_s instead of tos to String:Class
"String"

This is not for production! And it’s not for Rails either. It kills Rails. Until I figure out how to make GuessMethod not kill Rails, it will kill Rails.

That being said, I use it all the time. My irb sessions are full of pretty messages and corrected typos.

Enjoy!

I finally got the 1.9 itch bad enough. I didn’t see any brainlessly simple “Install Ruby 1.9 alongside 1.8.x” guides, and as I’m relatively new to serious Unix-y system usage I like those kinds of things. Anyway, in the event that someone’s looking for a brainlessly simple “Install Ruby 1.9 alongside 1.8.x” guide:

svn co http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/trunk ruby19
cd ruby19
autoconf
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --program-suffix=19 --with-readline-dir=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Certainly, old hands have this down, and much of this is in the README. But the secret is --program-suffix=19, which leaves ruby alone and gives you ruby19 as your 1.9 executable.

Then I ran the benchmark stuff from this thread, and here’s how it went:

mvb:~ cms$ ruby calculate.rb
55

Ruby 1.8.6 patch 0 on i686-darwin8.9.1
It took 9.167413 seconds to run. 109082 iterations per
second.

mvb:~ cms$ ruby19 calculate.rb
55

Ruby 1.9.0 patch 0 on i686-darwin8.10.1
It took 3.059674 seconds to run. 326832 iterations per
second.

Ara Howard has just released a cross-platform MAC address reporting tool called macaddr. I read the code (it’s only 33 lines), and I’m glad I did. It’s like a little Ruby lesson on singleton methods.

Recently a user by the name of 7stud has been asking questions about Hash on comp.lang.ruby. In some curiosity fueled by his, I was playing around with this:

class Hash
  alias_method :old_get, '[]'

  def [](key)
    puts "#{key} => #{old_get(key)}"
    old_get(key)
  end
end

I was expecting little more than (assuming a = {:b => ‘c’}):

003:0> a[:b]
b => c
"c"

But what I got (besides a whole bunch of irb config values and Wirble related output) included this:

a =>
a =>
[ => #<IRB::SLex::Node:0x13dce34>
: =>
: => #<IRB::SLex::Node:0x13dd514>
b =>
b =>
b =>
] => #<IRB::SLex::Node:0x13dd6cc>=>
] => RubyToken::TkRBRACK

 => #<IRB::SLex::Node:0x13df7b0>

It’s too late on a Sunday to look further, but it’s nice to see how much is right there for the gleaning.