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(For those keeping track at home of my Ruby vs. Ruby/C vs. C++
adventures, I decided to go with pure Ruby and optimise afterwards
if/where needed and my supervisor agreed. I also started coding
yesterday, and would like to state that (a) Ruby test-driven development
is even more sexy than advertised and (b) humblelittlerubybook.com is
a really great book.)

On to my problem, then. :) First, the terminology: a block is a set of
vectors (say, integers), a blanket is a set of blocks, and a blanket
might be, but in most cases isn, encoded i.e., might have its blocks
named. Thus an example, unencoded two-block blanket might look like
this: {{1, 9, 4, 7}, {1, 9, 3, 7}}

My obvious first approach was to create a Block class with two
properties, a @vectors Set and an @encoding Symbol, and a Blanket
class with a @blocks Set.

Now that I think about it, though, most of the computing will happen
with unencoded blankets, and in this case there¡Çs no need for a Block
class at all; just a Blanket with a Set of Sets. First, this (I presume)
would make things a bit faster and less memory hungry; second, the
encoding makes sense only at the Blanket level, really.

Ufortunately, an encoded blanket screams to be represented as a Hash of
Sets (keyed with the encoding Symbols), while an unencoded blanket is
best represented as a Set of Sets, and can¡Çt be a Hash. 

What would be the best approach to this situation? An EncodedBlanket
subclass of Blanket? A Blanket class that is a Hash of Symbols keyed
with Sets (i.e., the other way around, with nil hash values for
unencoded blankets)? Something else? Basically, what I need is
a hash that doesn¡Çt have to have keys¡Ä

-- Shot
-- 
Can't you feel the peace and contentment in this block of code? Ruby
is the language Buddha would have programmed in.     -- Sean Russell

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