apologies:  i meant that to appear as a new post.

www.counterpane.com/solitaire.html

i've just finished implementing this (for fun) in my language of
choice (k) which does *not* contain regular expressions or pattern-
matching.  since other projects (of the paying kind) insist on
occupying the top of my stack, i thought it would be interesting
to see what others in the ruby community could devise.

bravo matz - an elegant piece of work indeed.