Ruby For bloggers

There are 2 main issues to deal with when posting a technial post on a blog:

1. Syntax Highlighting
There is a wonderful service at The Complex which exports a beautiful Ruby (and other) code, as you see in this blog also.

2. Exampling
You want to example a piece of code you did, how to do it?
try this line:

1. def show(&block)
2. printf("%-25s>> %s\n", expr = block.call, eval(expr, block.binding).inspect)
3. end

for example:

1. show {%{ a = [1,2,3] }} ; show {%{ a.slice(1,2) }} ; show {%{ a.map { |x| x**3 } }}  

will result in:

1. a = [1,2,3]                 >>  [1, 2, 3]  
2. a.slice(1,2)                 >>  [2, 3]  
3. a.map { |x| x**3 }      >>  [1, 8, 27]