Re: Perl is more intuitive

[Joost]

The ruby code you've written doesn't work for generic hashes (it does for arrays but it's not at all idiomatic).

You can write the ruby code for hashes a lot more intuitively like so:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

# example data
hash = {
    'a' => '1',
    'b' => '2',
    'c' => '3',
}

hash.each do | k, v |
   puts "#{k} - #{v}<br/>"
end

Update for the interested: ruby does have sigils, but they denote "scope" instead of "type": $ - global, @ - instance property and @@ - "static" class property. No sigil basically means lexical scope (automatic variable).

The reasoning behind this probably is, that variables that can be declared "somewhere else" in the code have sigils, but "local" variables don't need sigils since you can see that they are variables because they're declared a close by. In some respects ruby is even more fanatic about saving characters than perl :-) That there is no way to distinguish "type" by sigil is a good thing - since it makes it a lot easier to emulate the built-in types' API with user-defined classes.

[kiat]

That looks very clean. And I supposed the each is a good-enough contextual clue that a hash is being called.

[Joost]

each is actually a method name that's used for many of the container types; arrays use it too:

arr.each { | x |  # iterates the elements, NOT the index 
  puts x
}

Basically, each here is just a method that recieves a block (like perl's anonymous subroutines) as an argument. The container type is then responsible for calling the block for each element.

Any class can provide it's own each method - this is not a built-in function like perl's foreach.

[kiat]

Ah, I see.

Then if I'm new to the language and I'm reading someone's code, it may be harder for me to understand what's going on, unless the variables are named such as to give a hint e.g. arr_grades, hash_address.