From: Marc Chantreux <khatar@...>
Date: 2011-01-28T16:54:39+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:34933] Re: make ruby support line continuations ?

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 02:50:00PM +0900, "Martin J. D�rst" wrote:
> Others have made many valid comments. I also agree that having commas at  
> the start of a line looks very unnatural.

Totally agreed with this: my own experience about it

* it was the coding style of a former employer
* i used it just to respect the coding style of the project i'm involved
  in but hated it. i had my own projects at home with a "natural" coding
  style.
* the difference was obvious some weeks after: changing habits isn't so
  hard and it really helped to make code easier to read/maintain

Someone told me there is a difference between English and Natural: true!
Functionnal programmers (haskell for exemple) are really unconfortable
hidding comas at the end of the line and some of them are pissed off
about that. 

I'm not asking you to change your habits or even the recommended ruby 
syntax in the documentation but, as langage designers, to let choice to
your programmers to know what's good for them.

> array.collect {
> }.group_by {
> }.sort_by {
> }...

you know what ? those kind of things made me stick on perl5 when i
discovered ruby. as 

>   array.collect {}
>   .group_by {}
>   .sort_by {}

is so much "Natural ?" and readable for me but didn't work when i tried
ruby. having some awesome stuff to make things natural ( map and map!,
name=() vs set_name, ...) and not giving the choice of how to shape your
code frustrated me a lot.

Thanks to you all adding this degree of liberty to your users. Can't you
make it one step forward ? :-)

regards 
marc