From: Charles Nutter <redmine@...>
Date: 2011-01-18T14:51:17+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:34550] [Ruby 1.9-Feature#4288][Open] Allow invoking arbitrary method names with foo."something" syntax

Feature #4288: Allow invoking arbitrary method names with foo."something" syntax
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4288

Author: Charles Nutter
Status: Open, Priority: Normal

This is one Groovy feature I tend to like.

For non-standard or arbitrary method names, it would be nice to have a way to invoke them directly that doesn't require the parser to be made more complex nor require an intermediate "send" call. Groovy does this by allowing the following form:

foo."asdf"()

This syntax would make it easier to integrate with other languages that have different naming rules. For example, =!@+= is a valid operator in Scala. With this syntax, you could invoke it as

foo."=!@+=" bar

The alternative in JRuby is that we have to map such names as eq_bang_at_plus_eq, which is certainly not as elegant, or force people to use send (and force them to use :"" anyway, since :=!@+= is not a valid symbol).

It's left up for debate whether string interpolation should be allowed in this syntax.


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