Question

require 'pp'  p *1..10 

This prints out 1-10. Why is this so concise? And what else can you do with it?

Answer 1

It is ‘the splat’ operator. It can be used to explode arrays and ranges and collect values during assignment.

Here the values in an assignment are collected:

a, *b = 1,2,3,4  => a = 1    b = [2,3,4] 

In this example the values in the inner array (the [3,4] one) is exploded and collected to the containing array:

a = [1,2, *[3,4]]  => a = [1,2,3,4] 

You can define functions that collect arguments into an array:

def foo(*args)   p args end  foo(1,2,'three',4)  => [1,2,'three',4]