From: Stefan Kaes <skaes@...>
Date: 2005-11-22T09:54:46+09:00
Subject: Re: semenatics of if/unless/while statement modifiers

Eric Hodel wrote:

> On Nov 21, 2005, at 4:37 PM, Stefan Kaes wrote:
>
>> Mauricio Fern�ndez wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 08:22:59AM +0900, Stefan Kaes wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I found that
>>>>
>>>> if (variable = expr)
>>>>   ... do something with variable ...
>>>> end
>>>>
>>>> works, whereas
>>>>
>>>> ... do something with variable ... if (variable = expr)
>>>>
>>>> doesn't.
>>>>
>>>> I can't find a good reason why these two forms differ in semantics.
>>>>
>>>
>>> See [ruby-talk:166828].
>>>
>>>
>> And how do I get to [ruby-talk:166828]?
>
>
> From the list archive:
>
> http://ruby-talk.org/ruby/ruby-talk/index.shtml
>
Thanks a lot.

So this behaviour is caused by intermingling parsing with semantic 
analysis. Much like forward procedure declarations were required for old 
Pascal compilers.

I hope this will be changed for Ruby 2.0, as it's an ugly wart on an 
otherwise very clean lanuage.