ruby blood through your .net veins

No other programming language has been syntactically as nice as ruby. Ruby is fully object oriented, most other languages appear to be not so consistent, especially when it comes to primitive data types vs classes. In ruby, everything is an object, in many other object oriented language this is not the case. Most of them have primitive data types besides classes, which means that you cannot necessarily call methods on all types. And, ruby’s syntax lets you write much functionality with little code.

But ruby is not alone, .NET is catching up a bit with each release. Now with version 3.5, M\$ has introduced extension methods. They allow to extend classes dynamically, without the need to subclass.

My first thought was, let’s .NET look more like ruby, in respect to its fully object oriented data types. In ruby you could write 2.times {...} to create a neat loop. In .NET, this is now possible too! You just have to write a static class with static methods, where its first paramater is prefixed with this. The first parameter defines the class type the method is added to. That’s it. You can even overload methods. And, the newly created methods popup in intellisense!

2.Times? The rubyists among you know where this is going…

Example 1: Extend String class

Let’s extend the string class with an overloaded Replace-Method that performs a regexp replace.

public static class StringExtensions
{
    public static string Replace(this string stringRef, string pattern, string replace, RegexOptions options)
    {
        return Regex.Replace(stringRef, pattern, replace);
    }
}

Call it like this:

public class Program
{
    private static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string stringOrig = "this is stupid.";
        string stringReplaced = stringOrig.Replace(@"(this) is ([^\.]+)\.", "$1 is not $2!", RegexOptions.None);
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Orginal string: {0}\nReplaced string: {1}", stringOrig, stringReplaced));
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

Pretty neat so far huh? But now, let’s face the 2.times code.

Example 2: Create a ruby style iterator

public static class IntegerExtensions
{
    public delegate void IntegerExtensionsDelegate(int intRef);

    public static bool IsEven(this int intRef)
    {
        return intRef % 2 == 0;
    }

    public static void Times(this int intRef, IntegerExtensionsDelegate invokeMethod)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < intRef; ++i)
        {
            invokeMethod(i);
        }
    }
}

Let’s call it now:

public class Program
{
    private static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        /* ruby heart beats faster */
        if (2.IsEven())
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Number 2 is even!");
        }
        Console.WriteLine("And now: 2 times loop"); 

        /* ruby heart collapses in bliss */
        2.Times(delegate(int number) { Console.WriteLine("> " + number); });
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

The Times method almost looks like a ruby iterator with a block assigned. Instead of having a block, we just pass a anonymous method (aka. delegate) to the Times method, and we pretty much get what we wanted.

If you’re interested in details on the compiler output, you can read about it on Scott Hanselmann’s Computer Zen.