From: Eero Saynatkari <ruby-ml@...>
Date: 2009-02-10T22:30:48+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:21951] Re: New hash : syntax for the 1.8 series?

Excerpts from Akinori MUSHA's message of Tue Feb 10 14:34:50 +0200 2009:
> At Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:30:55 +0900,
> Brent Roman wrote:
> > I always liked the new hash symbol key colon syntax introduced in 1.9
> >
> > h = {dog: "bark", cat: "meow", horse: "neigh", programmer: "z z z"}
> >
> > It's especially nice in method invocations:
> >
> > animal.noises dog: "bark", cat: "meow", horse: "neigh"
> >
> > Is anyone working working on porting this back to 1.8?
> > Anyone else interested in this?
> 
> Yes.  Backporting syntactic changes is a big part of the plan for ruby
> 1.8.8, although some features in 1.9 can never be integrated into 1.8
> because of compatibility constraints or implementation limitations.
> Considering those unfortunate cases, I am thinking of making the 1.8
> interpreter at least capable in parsing 1.9 specific constructs
> without error, although it may not be able to actually run it.

I personally feel this is not the best course of action. I see no
reason for anyone to stay with the 1.8 line unless it is due to
some company policy/security/risk concern, and in those cases the
only changes should be security and bugfixes that do not change
the language.

That is, I do not understand the case for essentially two parallel
lines of implementation of new features. So far as I understand,
there is nothing in 1.9 that would disqualify it from use if one
accepts the changes anyway. Migration is certainly always something
that takes a certain amount of time, but 1.8 -> 1.9 is not too bad
just to get working--after which one can start using new features.
My feeling is that this migration is best get over with as soon
as possible.

I am also not entirely convinced about the "not maintaining two
versions of the library" argument, in that if the 1.8 line is
essentially hard frozen for new features, then there is no need
to do *anything* to create an 1.8 branch but to keep what one
has right now (and any updates to 1.8.8 will not break it, just
fix bugs etc.) On the other hand, it would seem to me that if
1.8.8 is unlike 1.8.{6,7} but also not quite like 1.9, there
would be a need to actually manage the two library branches
because there is variance in both.

As usual, I am keenly aware that I may be overlooking something
crucial, and would be happy to hear where my thinking has gone
wrong.

Also, thanks for both maintainers' hard work.. it is often
thankless enough without people like me complaining on top
of that.


Eero

--
Magic is insufficiently advanced technology.