Streams are lazily evaluated lists. I have been inspired by James'
excellent blog about infinite streams, and the functional interface
of Scheme towards their usage.
But just in order to keep this short I have put all the links to the
release, documentation and other sources on the Labrador Rubyforge
Homepage. http://labrador.rubyforge.org/index.html
Enjoy.
Robert
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--
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the
dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any
longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but
the world as it will be ... ~ Isaac Asimov
Aside: it is also possible to make use of infinite enumerators in Ruby
(i.e. a traditional 'each' method which yields an infinite number of
values), and this may be sufficient in some applications.
In order for this to be useful, you need to process chains of methods
acting 'horizontally' instead of 'vertically'. The block form of
Enumerator lets this be done natively in ruby 1.9: http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/707
Anyway, I just thought this was worth a mention. It's not as powerful as
full lazy evaluation, although if you combine this with Generators I
think it gets pretty close.