CSC302 2011S, Class 03: Ruby (2)

Overview:
* Leftover topics from day 1.
* New ideas from 2.3.
* Lab.

Admin:
* Apologies for not getting the reading link in proper place today.
* Lessons from yesterday's session?
* Reading for Monday (respond Sunday): the rest of Tate 2.
* I am perenially behind.  I expect to get next week's assignment posted 
  by this evening.

Sam's "What are the differences between arrays and ranges" example

Why might Ruby treat blocks and functions differently?

* Maybe treating them differnetly makes the language simpler
* Maybe performance reasons
* Maybe limited vision
* Treating them as perfectly equivalent conflicts with other language
  design decisions
  Does foo mean
  * Call foo
  * The value of the "function" foo
* Blocks seem to be designed more to be anonymous?

From 2.3

* Ruby has kitchen sink "arrays"
* Ruby provides a built in dictionary data type that people call a "hash"
* For fast comparisons, Ruby provides a symbol data type
* Ruby provides classes.
  And inheritance
  And mixin
  And ugly syntactic sugar for building getters and setters

Lab reflection

* Arrays seem to be passed by reference
* Integers seem to be passed by name
* or ...