A marshmallow toasting dragon slayer from Montréal asked about the unary &.

I like this question, because when I saw it, I realized immediately that although I’ve figured out how to use it to accomplish certain things, writing an answer serves the excellent purpose of forcing myself to learn more.

Let’s start with what I do know, and what everyone can figure out from grepping source code: It has something to do with converting things to and from blocks. If you take nothing else away from this, remember that when you see a unary “&” in Ruby, you are looking at making something into a block, or making a block into something.

Now, blocks in Ruby are not first-class entities. You cannot store them in variables. They are not objects. There is no Block.new expression. The only way to make a block in Ruby syntax is to write one as part of a method call, like this:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].map { |x| x * x  }
    => [1, 4, 9, 16, 25]

As we said above, you cannot assign a block to a variable:

square_block = { |x| x * x  }
    => syntax error, unexpected '}', expecting $end

What do we do with these blocks? Well, inside of a method, we can yield to a block. Yielding to a block is something very much like calling a function. The value of an expression yielding to a block is the value of the expression in the block, paramaterized by anything you pass in the yield expression.

Oh heck, an example is much better:

def take_a_guess(range) # expects a block testing a guess
    guess = range.begin + rand(range.end - range.begin)
    if yield(guess)
        "Yay, I guessed correctly"
    else
        "Boo hoo, my guess was wrong"
    end
end

take_a_guess(1..10) { |x| x == 6 }
    => "Boo hoo, my guess was wrong"
take_a_guess(1..10) { |x| x == 6 }
    => "Boo hoo, my guess was wrong"
take_a_guess(1..10) { |x| x == 6 }
    => "Yay, I guessed correctly"

This method plays a guessing game with you: it takes a range (“guess a number from one to ten”) and a block for testing whether the guess was correct. It takes a guess and yield the guess to the block. It then exclaims its joy to the world if it guesses correctly.

Notice that there is nothing in the method signature saying it expects a block. There is no name for the block. You have to look for the yield keyword to figure out what is going on if the programmer doesn’t add a comment.

converting blocks to procs

So… Let’s talk conversions. If you want to do anything besides invoke a block with yield, you really want a Proc, not a block. For example:

class Guesser
    attr_reader :range, :tester
    def initialize(range, &tester)
        @range, @tester = range, tester
    end
    def take_a_guess
        guess = range.begin + rand(range.end - range.begin)
        if tester.call(guess)
            "Yay, I guessed #{guess} correctly"
        else
            "Boo hoo, my guess of #{guess} was wrong"
        end
    end
end

foo = Guesser.new(1..10) { |n| n == 6 }
foo.take_a_guess
    => "Boo hoo, my guess of 2 was wrong"
foo.take_a_guess
    => "Boo hoo, my guess of 8 was wrong"
foo.take_a_guess
    => "Yay, I guessed 6 correctly"

We want to store the tester block as an instance variable. So what we do is add a parameter at the very end with an ampersand, and what Ruby does is take the block and convert it to a Proc, which you can pass around as an object. And when you want to use it, you send it the #call method.

Now if you think about this for a second or two, you’ll realize that almost every Proc you ever create works this way: We pass a block to a method, and the method turns it into a proc by having a parameter with an &. Let’s try writing another one:

def our_proc(&proc)
    proc
end

double = our_proc { |n| n * 2}
double.call(7)
    => 14

Not much to it, is there? When you want a Proc, you can create one by calling a method with a block and using &parameter to convert the block to a Proc. There is no other way to convert a block to a proc because the only place blocks exist is in method invocations.

converting procs to blocks

Okay, we know how to make a Proc out of a block. What about going the other way? What if we want to make a block out of a Proc?

Let’s reopen our Guesser class:

class Guesser
    def three_guesses
        guesses = Array.new(3) { range.begin + rand(range.end - range.begin) }
        if guesses.any?(&tester)
            "Yay, #{guesses.join(', ')} includes a correct guess"
        else
            "Boo hoo, my guesses of #{guesses.join(', ')} were wrong"
        end
    end
end

bar = Guesser.new(1..10) { |x| x == 3 }
bar.three_guesses
    => "Yay, 5, 9, 3 includes a correct guess"

What just happened?

For starters, we made an array with three guesses in it. That line of code includes a block, but let’s ignore that as being irrelevant to this particular discussion. The next part is what we’re after:

We then want to call Enumerable#any? to ask the array if any of its members are the correct guess. Now #any? expects a block. But we don’t have a block, we have a Proc. So now we do the reverse of what we did when we wanted to convert a block to a Proc: instead of a method having an extra parameter with an ampersand, we pass a parameter to the method and apply the ampersand to the parameter we are passing.

So “&tester” says to Ruby: “Take this object and pass it to a method as a block.” The #any? method gets a block, it has no idea we are doing any Proc to block conversion shenanigans. We can prove that:

def did_you_pass_me_a_block?
    if block_given?
        yield
    else
        "NO BLOCK"
    end
end

did_you_pass_me_a_block?
    => "NO BLOCK"
did_you_pass_me_a_block? { 'I passed you a block' }
    => "I passed you a block"
proc = Proc.new { 'I passed you a proc' }
did_you_pass_me_a_block?(&proc)
    => "I passed you a proc"

As you can see, our methods don’t really know whether they get a block or a proc passed as a block. They just yield and all is well. (And yes, you can convert a block to a proc and then the method can convert it right back into another proc.)

to_proc shakur

Which leads us to the final piece of the puzzle. How does Ruby convert whatever you pass with “&” into a block? The answer is that if it is not already a Proc, it tries to convert the object to a Proc by calling the object’s #to_proc method, and from there it converts the Proc into a block.

So you can do fun stuff like convert strings into blocks by defining a method that converts a string to a Proc:

(1..5).map &'*2'
    => [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]

Note that this conversion only happens when you try to pass a string as a block to a method with “&.” It is not correct to say that “&” converts an object to a Proc, the #to_proc method does that. It is correct to say that when passing an object to a method, the “&” unary operator tries to convert the object to a block, using the Object’s #to_proc method if need be.

We’ll close with an example, where we decide that a Guesser can be converted to a Proc:

class Guesser
    def to_proc
        Proc.new { |guess|
            "Yay, I guessed #{guess} correctly" if tester.call(guess)
        }
    end
end

foo = Guesser.new(1..10) { |n| n == 8 }
&foo
    => syntax error, unexpected tAMPER
foo.to_proc
    => #<Proc:0x0008cc08@-:26>
(1..100).map(foo).compact.first
    => ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)
(1..100).map(&foo).compact.first
    => "Yay, I guessed 8 correctly"

So that’s it: When you want to convert a block to a Proc, define an extra parameter for your method and preface it with an ampersand. When the method is called, the parameter will hold a proc.

When you want to convert any object to a block, pass it to a method expecting a block and preface it with an ampersand. Ruby will call the #to_proc method if need be, then convert the Proc into a block.

because it’s friday

I really hate writing anything too serious on a Friday. So if you’re eyes have glazed over and you’ve marked this to be read later, here’s a little diversion for you. I just picked up The Magic Garden of George B. And Other Logic Puzzles by my favourite nonfiction author, Raymond Smullyan.

Right off the bat, the first paragraphs of the preface introduce a neat puzzle:

Here is a remarkable problem: Imagine a garden of magic flowers that can change color from day to day. On any one day, a flower is either blue the entire day or red the entire day, but can change from one day to another. Given any flower A and any flower B, there is a flower C that is red on all and only those days on which A and B are both blue. Also, we are given that for any distinct flowers A and B, there is at least one day on which A and B are of different colors. Now suppose that the number of flowers is somewhere between 200 and 500. How many flowers are in the garden?Amazingly enough, the problem actually has a unique solution! Doesn’t this surprise you?

Have fun!