The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Third Edition

Chapter 14. Callable and runnable objects

This chapter covers

• Proc objects as anonymous functions
• The lambda method for generating functions
• Code blocks
• Method objects
• Threads
• Executing external programs

In addition to the basic, bread-and-butter method calls that account for most of what happens in your program, Ruby provides an extensive toolkit for making things happen in a variety of ways. You need two or more parts of your code to run concurrently? Create some Thread objects and run them as needed. Want to choose from among a set of possible functions to execute, and don’t have enough information in advance to write methods for them? Create an array of Proc objects—anonymous functions—and call the one you need. ...