Re: syntax request

On Tue, 8 Apr 2008, Bill Kelly wrote:

>
> From: "David A. Black" <[e-mail]>
>> 
>> I guess it's all parsing, in a sense. I see it as the parser being
>> altered to accomodate the idea of a kind of lazy evaluation: "the"
>> object (the last thing on the line) sort of hangs around waiting until
>> we see what's happening next, and how that object is treated *depends*
>> on what's happening next. That's what I don't like.
>
> I don't necessarily like it either... but anyway I look at it more
> like the parser is trying to find the invisible semicolon. :)
>
> I suspect we're all glad Ruby doesn't require semicolons as statement
> separators.  But if it did, there would be nothing special or unusual
> about parsing:
>
>   puts object
>   .methods;

As you say, we're glad Ruby doesn't require semicolons :-)

It's very weird to me that given a line that consists just of "puts
object", it's impossible to know whether or not the program is going
to puts object, without knowing whether or not the first character of
the next line is a dot. Even though (I hope) the stray dot thing won't
be used very much, it means that we can now *never* really interpret a
line of Ruby code, based on visual scanning, without looking at the
first character of the next line. I think that's a net loss.


David

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