An interesting tidbit: can your programming language parse a < b < c? Perl can’t. Ruby can, but returns an error “undefined method `>’ for false:FalseClass.” Interestingly, Python accepts it, and even gives the correct result. Something clever must be going on in the parser to make that work.

Update October 17: Although Lisp can’t parse the expression directly, it does correctly handle the equivalent S-expression (< a b c).

A cool new site, with the best possible slogan, “All the code that’s fit to printf().” Nice to see a giant media company getting into this.

Answer: you’re using the latest version of Rails (1.2.3), which slightly changes the syntax of its SQL statements. cached_model relies on a regular expression to match that SQL statement.

To fix: Dive into the source of the cached_model gem, find the file lib/cached_model.rb, and change the first line after def self.find_by_sql to this:

    return super unless args.first =~ /^SELECT \* FROM #{table_name} WHERE \(#{table_name}\.`?#{primary_key}`? = '?(\d+)'?\) *(?:LIMIT 1)?/

And it works!