Ruby by Example

#25 Procs for Text (willow_and_anya.rb)

As I was planning the functional programming chapter of this book, I was watching DVDs of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I mention this because I had Procs and blocks on my brain, and I happened to encounter two very good candidates for text-based examples of lambda operations. In an episode called “Him,” there is discussion of a “love spell”, an “anti-(love spell) spell”, and an “anti-(anti-(love spell) spell) spell”. That’s a great example of successive modifications via a simple function. In another episode called “Same Time, Same Place,” there is a conversation that demonstrates simple variable substitution. Both are great examples of simple functions and are good venues to explore how Procs ...