An accurate answer to one of my questions was deleted. How can I recover it?

Question

Recently, a Stack Overflow user posted an accurate and helpful answer to one of my questions, and then deleted the answer for no apparent reason (perhaps by accident).

Is there anything I can do to recover this answer, despite my lack of administrative privileges?

Answer 1

I'm afraid I don't know quite enough Ruby to really give a proper answer, but I can use my 10k deleted-post Second Sight to give you the original contents of the post. The post was simply the code sample as follows below with no comentary:

def add_three_numbers num1 = nil, num2 = nil, num3 = nil
  undefined = local_variables.select{|var| eval(var.to_s).nil?} - [:undefined]
  puts "#{undefined.join(", ")} are undefined" unless undefined.empty?
end

add_three_numbers
# => num1, num2, num3 are undefined

add_three_numbers(1)
# => num2, num3 are undefined

I would post it as an answer, but, as I said, I don't know enough Ruby to provide meaningful commentary. I'd encourage you to self-answer and provide commentary as you understand it.

If you want to credit sawa's original post (visible only to >10k users), the exact answer link is https://stackoverflow.com/a/18476747/710446.

Answer 2

It might be "accurate", but man is it lacking in explanation.

I don't know a whole lot of Ruby - just enough to be dangerous - but I can't understand your answer well enough to feel confident in it. It doesn't explain why it addresses the concerns of the OP. It's just...code. While I'll willingly submit that, if I understood Ruby better, I could get the gist of it just by glancing at it; but that's not the case with this code snippet.

I can definitely see (and agree with) its removal, but if you want the answer, then aspillers has it for you in his answer.