Trying to understand ruby's complexity, but makes no sense so far.
5.times(method(:puts))
Gives error, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Do I have some kind of syntax error or is it not possible to do in ruby?
ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (given 1, expected 0)
from (irb):78:in `times'
I am trying to do something similar to
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4].forEach(console.log)
and
java.util.stream.IntStream.range(0, 5).forEach(System.out::println);
At the same time these do work:
method(:puts).call(1)
# and
5.times { |i| puts i }
times takes a block argument, which is distinguished from "regular" arguments by an ampersand. You can either pass it an explicit block
5.times { |x| puts x }
or you can pass it a value with &
5.times(&method(:puts))
Having the block argument treated differently allows us to write methods that look and act a lot like built-in statements. For instance, an infinite loop in Ruby can be written as
loop {
# fun stuff happening in here
}
But loop is a method in the core library, not a built-in keyword. We could've written that loop function ourselves. Enumerable and other modules make heavy use of block arguments to provide friendlier syntax, which is one of the primary goals of Ruby as a language.