From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2005-01-04T18:18:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Allowing custom number literal suffixes?


On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Brent Roman wrote:

> I'm not sure I would advocate making Ruby's grammar even more
> byzantine (e.g. where, exactly, are parenthesis required vs.
> optional?) but, "wenn schon, denn schon"

Funny that you mention this, because this actually changed significantly
between Ruby 1.6 and Ruby 1.8; the former conventions wrt nested
methodcalls were more Perl-like and then, suddenly, only outermost
methodcalls could skip parens (which broke a *lot* of my code back then).
Well, the rule �wenn schon denn schon� apparently didn't apply at that
particular moment in Ruby's history, I guess !

> Why not add something more similar to obj.method_missing for 
> unrecognized numeric literals?  If a token begins with a digit and 
> cannot be parsed into a number, Ruby calls
>    Kernel.unrecognized_numeric_literal (tokenString)

How is it found where the number ends? I assume that it would be whenever
a not-letter-nor-digit is encountered, outside of the normal valid uses of
period/minus/plus/underscore.

>    4:30:19AM
>    4.30.19A

In Canada, it is most usual to write 4:30:19 (24-hour style), at least on
official digital clocks. So IMHO it doesn't matter whether it's A or AM.
For the dot versus the colon, i don't know, but note that it is also
common practice, in the 23:45 or 11:45PM case, to write it as 23h45.

That is, I still prefer single-letter globals (as long as they're
uppercased), so it could be:

  T"4:30:19AM"

with T for time. of course this only works as long as someone else doesn't
insist on using T for something else (but there is nothing that can be
done about this)

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montr�al QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju