From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2004-08-24T20:21:48+09:00
Subject: Re: *with* block?

On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 07:49:19PM +0900, David A. Black wrote:
> If you're trying to fight back against Ruby's need for an explicit
> receiver in assignment-style method calls, I think you've won a bit of
> a Pyrrhic victory.  That looks like a bunch of assignments to local
> variables; I wouldn't want to have to train my eye to find the word
> "with" and then figure out that Ruby's normal assignment behavior was
> temporarily suspended.  That's a heavy price to pay for avoiding a few
> occurrences of the word 'self' (or 'some_obj', etc.).

For the matter, if you want you can keep

my_obj.with do
  @x = 0
  @y = 10
  @width = 100
  @height = 100
end

while making it 'accessor-safe'. One only has to create a throw-away
object to capture the values and inject them into the accessors.

Now, you might argue that this could be tricky for the untrained eye
because what looks like a normal assignment to instance variables is
transformed into a method call, and I'd rather agree.

So the problem is not as much what can be done in Ruby, as what we want
to take a "being Ruby" or simple/obvious enough, or not contradicting
the "normal rules". 

Whether we can take all the features/techniques used in the stdlib as
a reference for what's Ruby and what isn't, and therefore declare the
things not there as un-Ruby, is an open issue.  Of course, only matz
can really tell what is Ruby and what isn't.

I think the above might not be interesting for general usage, but in
some cases it could be useful (for instance when one disguises Ruby as
a domain specific language, in which case there is no concern about the
"Ruby nature" of the resulting language)

-- 
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