Elegant ruby syntax to return the greater of two objects

Of course there are a thousand ways to get this done, but is the simplest (or most elegant) way to achieve this?

[4,8].max

That'开发者_如何学运维s actually not too shabby, but what would you do?

If you don't want to spawn an array, there's the conditional operator:

max = a > b ? a : b

Okay, I tested this out of curiosity:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# -*- mode: ruby -*-

limit = 3000000

tstart_1 = Time.now()
(0..limit).each do |i; a,b, max|
  a = rand(9999999)
  b = rand(9999999)
  max = [a,b].max
end
puts "Array method: #{Time.now() - tstart_1} seconds"

tstart_2 = Time.now()
(0..limit).each do |i; a,b, max|
  a = rand(9999999)
  b = rand(9999999)
  max = (a > b) ? a : b
end

puts "Ternary method: #{Time.now() - tstart_2} seconds"

Output:

Array method: 1.746134 seconds

Ternary method: 1.002226 seconds

That's exactly why Enumerable#max has been defined for any class which implements Comparable. It's definitely the simplest. To really understad what's happening, you'd need to look how it's been implemented in the core library of your favourite Ruby implementation (and it's probably optimised).