Iterate over an infinite sequence in Ruby

In Ruby >= 1.9, you can create an Enumerator object that yields whatever sequence you like. Here's one that yields an infinite sequence of integers:

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.9

sequence = Enumerator.new do |yielder|
  number = 0
  loop do
    number += 1
    yielder.yield number
  end
end

5.times do
  puts sequence.next
end

# => 1
# => 2
# => 3
# => 4
# => 5

Or:

sequence.each do |i|
  puts i
  break if i >= 5
end

Or:

sequence.take(5).each { |i| puts i }

Programming Ruby 1.9 (aka "The Pickaxe Book"), 3rd. ed., p. 83, has an example of an Enumerator for triangular numbers. It should be easy to modify the Enumerator above to generate triangular numbers. I'd do it here, but that would reproduce the example verbatim, probably more than "fair use" allows.

Several answers are close but I don't actually see anyone using infinite ranges. Ruby supports them just fine.

Inf = Float::INFINITY # Ruby 1.9
Inf = 1.0/0 # Ruby before 1.9
(1..Inf).include?(2305843009213693951)
# => true
(1..Inf).step(7).take(3).inject(&:+)
# => 24.0

In your case

(2..Inf).find {|i| ((2..( i/2 + 1 )).select{|j| i % j == 0}.count+2)==42 }
=> 2880

Your brute force method is crude and can, potentially, take a very long time to finish.