Re: [RCR] Drop :: as a . synonym

Hi --

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Robert Dober wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 1:27 AM, David A. Black <[e-mail]> wrote:
> David
>
> more I read about this, more I overcome my emotional issue because I
> really start to see the beauty of your idea combined with the idea of
> method retrieval.
>
> A.b being a call and
> A::b being A.method(:b)
>
> BTW I still think that A::b is more readable than A.b because of the
> increased distance it puts between words, that is the same optical
> reason I like Smalltalk code for, the space being a better delimiter
> than the ".".
> Please kindly remark that in written language one puts a space after
> ",", ".", ";", "!" etc.  for a very good reason.

My reason is that it's conventional and expected in my language :-) I
don't think the human brain is inherently incapable of understanding a
dot that's not followed by a space, given a situation in which it's
been trained to do so. Dots are very versatile, and so are brains :-)

Mind you, I should add that I've pretty much abandoned "readability"
as a useful concept, since people disagree strongly about it and
unless some percentage of them are lying, different things really are
more "readable" to different people. It would be nice if it were
otherwise, but that seems to be the way it is.

> However this is a minor point and anyway sometimes I want to read
> "::" but am too lazy to write "::" ;).
>
> The above mentioned semantic would also indicate that the following
> becomes illegal
>
> class/module X
>   C = 42
>   def C; 42 end
> end
>
> which would be a good thing I believe.

I would tend to favor the constant, but that might not make sense.


David

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