[ruby-core:59878] Re: [ruby-trunk - Feature #9428] Inline argument expressions and re-assignment

I'm -1 for this.

1. aesthetically: it puts some of the function's code outside the
function's body, which makes it harder to follow a function's execution
when reading code, and it makes the signature unnecessarily messy.

2. syntactically: none of the proposals you've given make enough sense, at
least for me personally to understand what they mean:

  def foo( arg.to_i )
  def foo( arg.to_i as arg )

Is the left-most 'arg' a local variable, or referring to self#arg, or
something else..?

> Ruby could auto-assign the passed argument to the first variable
encountered in the expression.

According to my understanding of the parser, any heretofore unseen
"bareword" tokens are interpreted as function calls, so there is no "first
variable encountered."  It works for optional positional parameters because
they have an equals sign in (and 'bareword = expression' is universally
lvar creation/assignment, in Ruby).

3. debugability: the 'def' line is a single line, however there's no real
limit to the number of parameters you can include in that line.  If each of
those parameters can include arbitrary expressions, well, I'd hate to have
to debug a "NoMethodError: undefined method ... for nil:NilClass" on that
line.  And if the answer to that is to split the 'def' line over multiple
lines, then why not just put the expressions on those multiple lines anyway?

4. orthogonality: what about non-optional keyword arguments?

For what it's worth, I'm not entirely *for* allowing arbitrary expressions
in optional parameters either, but in that case I can't think of a better
representation.  But if I ever seen anything more than a #[] call in a
default value I consider it Bad Form

-- 
  Matthew Kerwin
  http://matthew.kerwin.net.au/