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Ruby Programming
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separate features: sequences, conditions, and intervals.

Ranges as Sequences

The first and perhaps most natural use of ranges is to express a sequence. Sequences have a start point, an end point, and a way to produce successive values in the sequence. In Ruby, these sequences are created using the ``..'' and ``...'' range operators. The two-dot form creates an inclusive range, while the three-dot form creates a range that excludes the specified high value.

1..10
'a'..'z'
0...anArray.length

In Ruby, unlike in some earlier versions of Perl, ranges are not represented internally as lists: the sequence 1..100000 is held as a Range object containing references to two Fixnum objects. If you need to, you can convert a range to a list using the to_a method.

(1..10).to_a [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
('bar'..'bat').to_a ["bar", "bas", "bat"]

Ranges implement methods that let you iterate over them and test their contents in a variety of ways.

digits = 0..9
digits.include?(5) true
digits.min 0
digits.max 9
digits.reject {|i| i < 5 } [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
digits.each do |digit|
  dial(digit)
end

So far we've shown ranges of numbers and strings. However, as you'd expect from an object-oriented language, Ruby can create ranges based on objects that you define. The only constraints are that the objects must respond to succ by returning the next object in sequence and the objects must be comparable using <=>, the general comparison operator. Sometimes called the spaceship operator, <=> compares two values, returning -1, 0, or +1 depending on whether the first is less than, equal to, or greater than the second.

Here's a simple class that represents rows of ``#'' signs. We might use it as a text-based stub when testing the jukebox volume control.

class VU

  include Comparable

  attr :volume

  def initialize(volume)  # 0..9     @volume = volume   end

  def inspect     '#' * @volume   end

  # Support for ranges

  def <=>(other)     self.volume <=> other.volume   end

  def succ     raise(IndexError, "Volume too big") if @volume >= 9     VU.new(@volume.succ)   end end

We can test it by creating a range of VU objects.

medium = VU.new(4)..VU.new(7)
medium.to_a [####, #####, ######, #######]
medium.include?(VU.new(3)) false

Ruby Programming
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