From: Brent Roman Date: 2007-10-29T02:50:17+09:00 Subject: What happened to floating point literals that start with a dot? While we're complaining about syntax changes... We use irb as an interactive command shell in our application. Users (used to) enter lots of commands like: Syringe.to .2 #milliliters Now, they will have to get used to: Syringe.to 0.2 #I guess Ruby versions after 1.6.8 dropped support for the leading . float literals. But, the current parsers always seem to be able to recognize them and complain in a meaningful way. Our users are not programmers. They don't have much sympathy for syntactical nuance. They will say: I can do it in Excel, so why can't I in Ruby? So, why was this (intuitive) form of the float literal dropped? What would likely break if I patched the parser to quietly accept the leading dot floats? I'm not worried about language compatibility here because these are commands quickly entered in an interactive shell. Is there some new syntax being planned that will lead to an ambiguity if leading dot float literals are allowed? -- Brent Roman Software Engineer Tel: 831 775 1808 425 Clinton St., Santa Cruz, California, 95062 mailto:brent@mbari.org http://www.mbari.org/~brent