Have you ever noticed Ruby doesn’t include support for linked lists? Most computer science textbooks are filled with algorithms, examples and exercises based on linked lists: inserting or removing elements, sorting lists, reversing lists, etc. Strangely, however, there is no linked list object in Ruby.
Recently after studying Haskell and Lisp for a couple of months, I returned to Ruby and tried to use some of the functional programming ideas I had learned about. But how do I create a list in Ruby? How do I add or remove an element from a list in Ruby? Ruby contains fast, internal C implementations of the Array and Hash classes, and in the standard library you can find Ruby code implementing the Set, Matrix, and Vector classes among many other things. But no linked lists – why?
Recently after studying Haskell and Lisp for a couple of months, I returned to Ruby and tried to use some of the functional programming ideas I had learned about. But how do I create a list in Ruby? How do I add or remove an element from a list in Ruby? Ruby contains fast, internal C implementations of the Array and Hash classes, and in the standard library you can find Ruby code implementing the Set, Matrix, and Vector classes among many other things. But no linked lists – why?
view source
