Ruby style question (many-arg methods)

[Nick Green]

If you are calling a method that takes a lot of arguments and starts a
block, how do you make that look pretty?

i.e.

Net::SSH.start(server,user,:password=>password,:port=>port,:other_stuff
=> somevariable, :foo => bar, :baz => qux) do |ssh|

Thats big and ugly and may or may not be > 80 and/or > 120 columns. I
have worked on code that does this:

Net::SSH.start(
server,
user,:
password=>password,
:port=>port,
:other_stuff => somevariable,
:foo => bar,
:baz => qux) do |ssh|

Which looks OK, except the code of the block continues on the same
indentation as the arguments, which (to me) makes it harder to read
quickly, i.e.

Net::SSH.start(
server,
user,:
password=>password,
:port=>port,
:other_stuff => somevariable,
:foo => bar,
:baz => qux) do |ssh|
foo = foo = new_foo
end

(ignore the actual functionality, lets assume noone is actually doing
something this silly :P)

This to me illustrates the point that its tricky to make out. I have
worked on a lot of C/C++ code that uses GNU-like style and does this :

Net::SSH.start(
server,
user,:
password=>password,
:port=>port,
:other_stuff => somevariable,
:foo => bar,
:baz => qux)
{
foo = new_foo
}

(just pretend that you can actually start a C block with NET::SSH.start,
actually this would be something like if
(complexFunction(blah,blah,blah))

Which looks nice i suppose but... uh... thats not ruby code, with ruby
you would need a \ after the closing paren, and you'd need to declare
your variables your passing to the block somewhere, like:

Net::SSH.start(
server,
user,:
password=>password,
:port=>port,
:other_stuff => somevariable,
:foo => bar,
:baz => qux) \
{ |ssh|
foo = new_foo
}

or

Net::SSH.start(
server,
user,:
password=>password,
:port=>port,
:other_stuff => somevariable,
:foo => bar,
:baz => qux) \
do |ssh|
foo = new_foo
end

Currently I use the last one, because that way at least there is a sort
of ruby-ish block. But the "conceptual decoupling" of the function from
the block trips me up occasionally.

Anyway, just got frustrated reading old code and was wondering if anyone
had a good solution for me ;p
--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

[Nick Green]

>
> Currently I use the last one, because that way at least there is a sort
> of ruby-ish block. But the "conceptual decoupling" of the function from
> the block trips me up occasionally.
>
> Anyway, just got frustrated reading old code and was wondering if anyone
> had a good solution for me ;p

Oops, wrote this all out of whack, currently I use this:

Net::SSH.start(
server,
user,:
password=>password,
:port=>port,
:other_stuff => somevariable,
:foo => bar,
:baz => qux) do |ssh|

foo = new_foo
end

But thats a weird half-indentation thing and I dno how I feel about it,
would maybe work if ruby indentatino were 4-space. I've tried the last
one (above) recently but the aforementioned decoupling trips me up

[Ehsanul Hoque]

Well, you should realize that leading whitespace on each new line is removed in emails and the like. So use some web service instead, like pastie. I assume you mean you use this method currently: http://pastie.org/676220

Well, I might do something like this (but I'm sure many would consider that ugly - just a personal preference really): http://pastie.org/676224

> Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:22:12 +0900
> From: cruzmai...@gmail.com
> Subject: Re: Ruby style question (many-arg methods)
> To: ruby...@ruby-lang.org

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[Nick Green]

Ehsanul Hoque wrote:
> Well, you should realize that leading whitespace on each new line is
> removed in emails and the like. So use some web service instead, like
> pastie. I assume you mean you use this method currently:
> http://pastie.org/676220
>
> Well, I might do something like this (but I'm sure many would consider
> that ugly - just a personal preference really): http://pastie.org/676224

Ah, yes I was using this via firefox not as a ML, and firefox preserved
the indenting. Your pastie guess is spot on though, thanks :)

I have used the method you pastied for a long time, I switched partially
because for some big-ole-method-calls I like to add
comments-per-argument.