My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder
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Since school has been back in, I've been much busier than (seemingly) ever. I haven't had the opportunity to do some of the things I've wanted (such as writing more in TDDing xorBlog), but I wanted to share my Wizard, which you can teach to learn spells. I should also note that this is the product of work with my partner, Clayton Smith.

We were given the assignment as a few unit tests:

require 'wizard'
require 'test/unit'

class WizardTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
   def setup
     @wiz = Wizard.new
   end

   def test_teach_one_spell
     got_here = false
     @wiz.learn('telepathy') { puts "I see what you're thinking"; got_here = true}
     @wiz.telepathy
     assert(got_here)
   end

   def test_teach_another_spell
     got_here = false
     spell_code = lambda { puts "no more clouds"; got_here = true}
     @wiz.learn('stop_rain', &spell_code)

     @wiz.stop_rain
     assert(got_here)
   end

   def test_teach_a_couple_of_spells
     got_here1 = false
     got_here2 = false
     @wiz.learn('get_what_you_want') { |want| puts want; got_here1 = true }
     @wiz.learn('sleep') { puts 'zzzzzzzzzzzz'; got_here2 = true}

     @wiz.get_what_you_want("I'll get an 'A'")
     @wiz.sleep

     assert(got_here1 && got_here2)
   end

   def test_unknown_spell
     @wiz.learn('rain') { puts '...thundering...' }

     assert_raise(RuntimeError, "Unknown Spell") {@wiz.raln }
   end
end

We simply had to make the tests pass:

class Wizard
   def initialize()
     @spells=Hash.new
   end
   def learn(spell, &code)
     @spells[spell]=code
   end
   def method_missing(method_id, *args)
     begin
       @spells["#{method_id}"].call(args)
     rescue
       raise("Unknown Spell")
     end
   end
end

Basically, all that happens is that when you create a Wizard, the initialize() method is called, and it creates a Hash to store spells in. Then you have a method, learn(), which takes as a parameter a block of code and stores that code in the Hash. Then when someone calls a method that doesn't exist for an object, Ruby automatically calls the method_missing() method. In this method, all I do is try to call the code stored in the hash under the name of the method they tried to call. If that doesn't work, I raise an exception with the message "Unknown Spell." Quite simple to do something so complex. I can't even imagine how I'd do something like that in a more "traditional" language (though, I can't say that I've tried either).

Can you imagine how cool it would be to say, have one programmer who wrote this Wizard into a game, and other programmers who just litter places in the game (in SpellBooks, consisting of Spells of course) with code that names the spell and specifies what it does? Without even needing to know anything about each other! Instantly extending what a Wizard can do, without even having to so much as think about changing Wizard - it's a beautiful world, indeed.

Hey! Why don't you make your life easier and subscribe to the full post or short blurb RSS feed? I'm so confident you'll love my smelly pasta plate wisdom that I'm offering a no-strings-attached, lifetime money back guarantee!


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