What does this mean in Ruby language?

Question

Run the following code,

a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
head, *tail = a
p head
p tail

You will get the result

1
[2, 3, 4, 5]
         


        

Answer 1

I don't know Ruby at all, but my guess is that the statement is splitting the list a into a head (first element) and the rest (another list), assigning the new values to the variables head and tail.

This mechanism is usually referred (at least in Erlang) as pattern matching.