From: "Ara.T.Howard" <ahoward@...>
Date: 2004-08-07T00:41:28+09:00
Subject: Re: %w for symbols

On Fri, 6 Aug 2004, David A. Black wrote:

> That actually points to another thing I was wondering about, namely,
> what would be the %?{ } equivalent of:
>
>  ["abc".intern, "hi there".intern]
>
> You couldn't do (using %m as a placeholder here):
>
>  %m{abc hi there}
>
> It would have to be
>
>  %m{abc "hi there"}
>
> I'm just wondering whether that would lead down a path of escape syntax that
> would make it less streamlined.

we are already down that path

   jib:~ > ruby -r yaml -e 'y %w(abc hi there)'
   ---
   - abc
   - hi
   - there

eg.  there is not %w equivalent of ["abc", "hi there"] and this has not been a
problem.

i don't think it would be a problem for symbols either since you could never
really need to do

   obj.send 'hi there'.intern

since you could never define

   def hi there
     42
   end

and you could never need

   hash['hi there'.intern]

since you could not type

   hash[:hi there]

well, never is a strong word - but this issue seems even more unlikely to
occur than needing to do it via a wordlist since symbols containing white
space are far and few between.

regards.

-a
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