Code can be Funny

Here's a tiny excerpt from the current chapter I'm writing: "Playing with Blocks". So far I've only posted the narratives that accompany each chapter. This piece of code made me chuckle, though, so I thought I'd share it. There's a lot of great discussion in the chapter about Methods, Procs, and blocks, and how to apply the differences to your coding style. So if this piques your interest, then look for the book next Spring:

While the adverb metaphor doesn't encapsulate nearly all of the uses of blocks, it is a particularly good one to demonstrate how becoming familiar with block-based programming will change the way you think about code. Languages with blocks let you do things sneakily:

def sneakily
   # There actually isn't such thing
   # as System.logger...so don't go
   # planning any bank hoists with this
   # example!
   System.logger.turn_off
   yield
   System.logger.turn_on
end

# Don't tell!
sneakily do
  1000.times {
     votes << Vote.new("Ted")
  }
end

Or, if you don't mind the consequences, even incorrectly

def incorrectly
   # This one actually works, but can
   # really mess up the interpreter depending
   # on what you put inside the block!

   # Temporarily randomize the result of addition
   class Fixnum
      def genrand(other) ; rand(other) ; end
      self.class_eval {
         alias :oldplus :+ ; alias :+ :genrand
      }
   end
   yield
   class Fixnum
      self.class_eval { alias :+ :oldplus }
   end
end

incorrectly do
   votes.count
end

Let's call the general idea code wrapping: creating code that is meant to wrap around other code. Code wrapping can be applied many ways. Block-based iteration is just code wrapping. A block-based iterator implements the iterating loop with an empty body waiting to be filled by the block provided by the caller.

Many elements of aspect-oriented programming are just code-wrapping, and later you will see how aspects such as logging and performance can be implemented in this way. Finally code-wrapping provides an excellent way to construct hierarchical documents such as HTML and XML by using block-based programming make Ruby look like a domain-specific language.

That's just the draft, of course. In the final copy, I'll make sure to vote 2000 times.