From: zuzu <sean.zuzu@...>
Date: 2004-12-12T05:13:14+09:00
Subject: puts / print as method not keyword?

so, i'm thinking about language design with a particular interest in
concatinative combinators (postfix notation).  you may remember my
questions and wonderful help jim weirich and others gave me some time
ago on the list w/r/t developing a pipes & filters syntax in ruby.

i started to worry that perhaps i was going to distort ruby out of
shape, when the case study i was running in my head seemed to be the
anomaly.  most of my "this is weird" thoughts seem to stem from the
design of the Kernel object and subsequently how it is mixed in to the
Object object.  (the Kernel object representing the ruby interpreter /
virtual machine itself; though the Object object representing the
rationally pure originator of all other objects supposedly including
the Kernel.)

so here's what i was thinking...   quite alot of ruby idioms make use
of object methods to express themselves in a "data.manipulate" or
"data.express" format; that is, something like:

  3.times

in a chain of

  3.times {puts "thingy!"}

.  (perhaps others can contribute other examples, or just look them up
in the pickaxe -- thanks dave & andy.)  but the Kernel's puts/print
fuction doesn't seem to carry over.  it works fine as a global
keyword, but a programmer cannot

   "this is a string".puts

and produce the desired result.  instead the programmer must

   puts "this is a string"

switching from postfix to prefix notation, most likely intuitive
because of experience C-style printf() or C++ style cout (or i suppose
BASIC).



however, i suppose the real answer should be "shut up and code it that
way for yourself then".  but i want to throw this out there for
discussion as to why this was implemented in this way to begin with,
as well as gather information from those who know offhand where the
source of this lies in the default object library.

thanks,
-z