# ruby ranges

a nice thing i stumbled upon in ruby yesterday:

    ( a:..:f ).to_a
    => [:a, :b, :c, :d, :e, :f]

i mean, this is right there at the top of the [range class documentation][1]
(since symbols `:a` work very much like strings `"a"`). but i've just never had
to use it before.

yesterday i was implementing a hexadecimal value converter, which is why this
came up. 0-9 values didn't need to be calculated, since they are already the
correct values, but i wanted a little, clever way to make `:a => 10, :b => 11`,
and so on.

    hex = ( :a..:f ).to_a
    val = ( 10..15 ).to_a
    return [hex, val].transpose.to_h

there was probably even a more simple way of doing this, but this was the way
that took me less than five minutes to figure out.