The Well-Grounded Rubyist

Chapter 14. Callable and runnable objects

 

In this chapter

• Proc objects as anonymous functions
• The lambda (a.k.a. proc) method
• Code blocks
• The Symbol#to_proc method
• Method objects
• Bindings
• The eval family of methods
• 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 in parallel? 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 ...