From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-01-12T18:25:56+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01126] Re: The value of while...

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:01122] Re: The value of while..."
    on 00/01/12, Dave Thomas <Dave@thomases.com> writes:

|> Taking that strategy, Ruby will grow into Perl sooner or later.
|> We should think one step smarter. :-)
|
|Well we could make it smaller today. Remove the concept of void
|expressions ;-)

One does not have to seek smaller.  That's the policy I learned from
Perl.  :-)

Telling use of void value expression has benefit, I think.  But there
may be better message for the error.

In message "[ruby-talk:01124] Re: The value of while..."
    on 00/01/12, Dave Thomas <Dave@thomases.com> writes:

|Thinking again about class definitions returning a value, I wonder how
|many people would find the concept of Class and meta-classes more
|obvious if the syntax were
|
|  Dave = Class.new {
|         }

Same policy applies here.  

|  class Dave
|  end

is more beautiful (from my view :-), and traditional than 

|  Dave = Class.new {
|         }

It's more important than being minimal.

|If a class definition returned a value, not just void, we could teach
|it this way.

Making a class difinition return the class, a module definition return
the module, are possible.  But since it's hard to implement unbound
method (Method is a method bound to a receiver), def cannot return
Method objects.

|(if this makes no sense, please forgive me - it's 3am and I'm typing
|one-handed with a teething baby on my shoulder!)

Oh, mine is bit older(2) playing with a trackball.

							matz.