From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-07-18T02:34:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Bug? String literal %s{#{a}} cause irb to abort


On Jul 17, 2004, at 7:52 AM, Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:

> On Sat, 2004-07-17 at 17:10, nobu.nokada@softhome.net wrote:
>
>> But I don't know why it delays until the next line;
>
> You are right, it doesn't assign anything to the variable, just delays
> reporting of the problem. E.g.
>
> [alex@dhcp-89-2 ruby]$ irb
> irb(main):001:0> a=%s
> irb(main):002:0:
> irb(main):003:0> puts "aaa"
> SyntaxError: compile error
> (irb):2: empty symbol literal
> (irb):3: syntax error
> puts "aaa"
>     ^
>         from (irb):3
>         from :0

That's because newlines are valid delimiters in that context:

irb(main):009:0> a=%s
irb(main):010:0: testing
irb(main):011:0>
=> :testing

It delays because it's waiting for you to close out the literal.

What you typed above is equivalent to this: a=%s{} puts "aaa"; so it 
give two errors: a compile error for the empty symbol, and a syntax 
error because to can't put puts where it is :)

cheers,
Mark