What? it! It what? it it! I’m so confused. Did it confuse you? Did what
confuse me? it! It what? … ugh, whatever.
it extends some commonly used Enumerable methods with a convenience: if
you pass them a block with no arguments (an arity of zero), and they expect
a block with a single argument, then your block will be injected with the
value that would normally be passed as that variable, as the variable named
“it”:
[1, 2, 3].each { puts it }
I achieve the magic of the it variable with some (ridiculously hacky) magic
that I wrapped into the EnvironmentedProc class. Unlike most of my projects,
this project is licensed as liberally as possible (see below), so you can use
EnvironmentedProc whenever and wherever you want. I hope somebody other than
myself finds it exciting!
EnvironmentedProc injects variables into the scope of a block. Incidentally,
it can also change the value of self for the duration of block execution.
See the documentation on EnvironmentedProc for more data.
@thingie = Proc.new {p [who, what, when, where]}
# … somewhere else …
@thingie.inject who: "why", what: "oh", when: "why", where: "!"
Man, I really need to change my self /-:
@thingie = Proc.new {self * 2}
# … somewhere else …
@thingie.set_self(2).call # => 4
You can install it as a pre–built gem, or you can build it directly from the
source.
The easiest way to install it is to use RubyGems to acquire the latest
‘release’ version from GitHub, using the gem command line tool:
# If you’ve ever done this before, you don’t need to do it now
# (see http://gems.github.com)
gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
gem install elliottcable-it
Alternatively, you can build a gem from the latest source yourself. You need git, as well as Rake:
git clone git://github.com/elliottcable/it.git
cd it
rake package:package
gem install pkg/it-*.gem
You can contribute bug fixes or new features to it by forking the project on
GitHub (you’ll need to register for an account first), and sending me a pull
request once you’ve committed and pushed your changes.
If you find bugs, you can report them on the issue tracker at GitHub: http://github.com/elliottcable/it/issues
If you’re looking for something to do, check out the open issues on that tracker, and maybe fix some bugs d-:
it is copyright ©2008 by elliottcable.
it is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3,
which allows you to freely utilize, modify, and distribute all it’s source
code (subject to the terms of the aforementioned license).
The sourcecode to the EnvironmentedProc class (in the file
lib/it/environmented_proc.rb) is additionally released under a liberal
MIT license (the “XFree86 License v1.1”). You may choose to use the
source code in that file under the terms of either of those two licenses,
according to your needs.