Lots of folks consider case expressions in Ruby a code smell. I’m not ready to write them off just yet, but I know a good replacement for some uses of case when I see it. Rad co-worker David Copeland’s Lookup Tables With Lambdas is one of those replacements. For cases where a method takes a parameter, throws it into a case, and returns a value, I can replace all that lookup business with a hash lookup. To carry the metaphor through, the hash is the lookup table. Rad.
Where it gets fun is when I need to do some kind of dynamic lookup in the hash. Normally I wouldn’t want to do that when the Ruby interpreter parses my hash literal. If I reach into my functional programming bag of tricks, I recall that lambdas can be used to defer evaluation. And that’s exactly what David recommends. If I’ve got database lookups or logic I need to embed in my tables, Ruby’s lambda comes to the rescue!
This approach works great at the small-to-medium scale. That said, I always keep in mind that a bunch of methods manipulating a hash, using its keys as a convention, is an encapsulated, orthogonal object begging to happen. Remember, it’s Ruby; we can make our objects behave like hashes but still do OO- and test-driven design.
