An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/implementing-lazy-enumerables-in-ruby/, by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao
This post is an excerpt from The Ruby Closures Book, written by Benjamin himself. If you like this post (and you will), tell us what you enjoyed at the end to be entered into a draw for a free copy! Now…read on…
I’ve always been fascinated by Ruby’s lazy enumeration, a feature that was introduced in Ruby 2.0. In this article, we take a deep dive into lazy enumeration, learning how Ruby implements this interesting programming technique by making your own lazy enumerable.
What exactly is lazy? Is Ruby trying to slack off? Being lazy refers to the style of evaluation. To let this sink in, consider the opposite of lazy evaluation: eager evaluation.
There really isn’t much to talk about regarding eager evaluation, as it’s the standard way Ruby works. But sometimes, being eager is a bad thing. For instance, what do you think this evaluates to:
1 irb> 1.upto(Float::INFINITY).map { |x| x * x }.take(10)
You might expect the result to be [1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100]. Unfortunately, the Ruby interpreter doesn’t know when to stop. The problem here is 1.upto(Float::INFINITY). 1.upto(Float::INFINITY) represents an infinite sequence. How does it look like in the console?
1 irb> 1.upto(Float::INFINITY)
2 => #<Enumerator: 1:upto(Infinity)>
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