Evan Martin (evan) wrote in evan_tech,
Evan Martin
evan
evan_tech

ruby blocks

A friend has been learning Ruby and asking questions. His first: why are procs and blocks different? (More simply: why aren't blocks special syntax for procs?)

All I could come up with is that "return" in a block returns from the lexically enclosing function, while "return" in a proc returns from the proc itself. (This is a useful distinction, though it leads to the confusing LocalJumpError exception when you call a block after control has passed away from its lexically enclosing function...)

Is that it?
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  • 12 comments

  • blog moved

    As described elsewhere, I've quit LiveJournal. If you're interested in my continuing posts, you should look at one of these (each contains feed…

  • dremel

    They published a paper on Dremel, my favorite previously-unpublished tool from the Google toolchest. Greg Linden discusses it: "[...] it is capable…

  • treemaps

    I finally wrote up my recent adventures in treemapping, complete with nifty clickable visualizations.