Question

Yes I know Ruby doesn’t have pointers, but that’s the closest I could get to describing what I want to do. In C++, I can increment a pointer to an array and it will point to the second element of the array as the start (basically like splicing from position 1 to size-1). Is there a similar trick in ruby? I have a set of steps in an array, and want to call a method “next_step” that will move one down the array. Can I do this without necessarily having another ivar called step_num (the current index)?

EDIT: I can’t just splice the array because it is encapsulated in an object and I need to keep it that way. I don’t want copies floating around.

Answer 1

You can use an enumerator:

a = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
e = a.to_enum

e.next    # => 1
e.next    # => 2
e.next    # => 3