On Mon, 04 Mar 2002 05:31:41 GMT, "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000 / hypermetrics.com>
wrote:

>Well, join will trivially undo this operation:
>
>    arr = ["X","Y","Z"]
>    str = arr.join             # "XYZ"
>
As mentioned above, join was just the thing I had forgotten. There is nothing so
trivial that my brain cannot fail to know it.

>But I'm thinking at a lower level than your app, so maybe
>I'm not helping any.

I think join will in fact help. You're second through the gates but often a nail
needs to be hit more than once.
>
>I did read your message in detail, but it was making
>my brain itch. The only way I could scratch it was to
>think about sandpaper. <ripoff comedian="Steven Wright"/>

Yes. It makes my brain itch as well. I worked a lot on extended set theory some
years ago. It can do really marvelous stuff in database type work. It translates
oddly into Ruby, because on the one hand some of the operations are really easy
to define and on the other hand, the fact that everything is wrapped in a
million bytes of object wrapper kind of gets in the way of what one would like
to do, which is just slam the bytes around.
>
>Maybe tomorrow I can understand it.

If tomorrow you can, you'll be beating the heck out of my record. I just started
doing this again recently because I ran into the guy who knows all this stuff
and got re-interested.

Believe me, set theory and byte manipulation dreams are no substitute for dreams
about hot young honeys of one's preferred format. Really weird.

Do all programmers have programming dreams sometimes? 

Anyway, thanks, I'll push on split and join a while ...

Ronald E Jeffries
http://www.XProgramming.com
http://www.objectmentor.com
I'm giving the best advice I have. You get to decide whether it's true for you.