Re: wondering about #tap

David A. Black schrieb:
> I haven't heard anything about the comma.

I think it was somewhere in the large amount of posts
about this topic (amusing - hundreds of lines of mails
about the question, where to place a "." ;-) ). At least
one thing is correct...

a = [ 1
     , 2
     , 3
     ]

...doesn't work in the moment.

> I'm just discussing what I think are the strengths and
> weaknesses of things.

I understand your intention. Here I have severe problems
in relation with Ruby, because it really became a multi
cultural language in the meantime. All other programming
languages I ever worked with, came from the USA or Europe
("Lua" from Brazil, but they use an European language
for human communication). This means, that these programming
languages came from a cultural environment, which has the
same origin. We can see it simply by looking at the
character sets the languages are based on (EBCDIC, Ascii,
and long ago some European variants).

Ruby is based on Japanese culture, which is different.
I don't know enough about Japan (except that I like to
play GO, but not good :-( ) to be able to assess which
expressive parts of the Japanese language influenced
parts of Ruby. Especially with the notation...

"Can there be an answer?".split('')
                          .map{42}
                          .join('-')

...I remember, that there were some posts speaking about the
relationship of this to Japanese (in one of the other Threads
about this topic, if I'm not wrong).

Insofar I don't know how to evaluate constructs as a strong
or weak construct, because I would like to evaluate it in
conjunction with the usual cultural way how persons express
themselves.

There are some some features in Ruby too, where I read a lot
of discussions, but which I like to use sometimes. to use
symbols like Σ or Π in...

def Σ(*p)
   p.inject(&:+)
end
def Π(*p)
   p.inject(&:*)
end
puts Σ(11, 22, 33, 44) # => 110
puts Π(11, 22, 33, 44) # => 351384

Wolfgang Nádasi-Donner