From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-01-16T21:42:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Fwd: [suby-ruby] Your all time desired fundemental Ruby mod

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 18:21:08 +0900, Csaba Henk
<csaba@phony_for_avoiding_spam.org> wrote:
> On 2005-01-16, trans.  (T. Onoma) <transami@runbox.com> wrote:
> > I'm taking a little poll.
> >
> > Let say you're Matz, but without any of the pressures of keeping up with a
> > previous version of Ruby. What one thing above all others would you like to
> > see differ about Ruby?
> Docstrings.
> 
> Let's see what Matz (the real one) says about this (in ruby-talk:20264):
> "" Yes, indeed.  Docstring is for man (or woman), so that - I think -
> "" interpreter itself does not need to have them.  Lisp (including Emacs)
> "" and Smalltalk have interactive environment built in.  Docstrings is
> "" useful in such systems.  Ruby is not.  For example, in daemon program
> "" written in Ruby, docstrings are nothing but memory burden.
> 
> But, for heaven's sake, I use ruby as an interactive environment quite
> reguralry! In fact, it's a beautiful interactive environment (except for
> docstrings lacking). Why to close ruby into a niche, just because it
> fits there excellently?
> 
> (With appropriate docsstring syntax, the interpreter could either regard
> them as comments or attach them as variables to the corresponding class
> or method [depending on options], so the "memory burden" argument is not
> valid.)

No, "memory burden" is quite valid. Come up with a clean way for Ruby
to have docstrings, but yet easily allow someone to dump them if
necessary. I find I rarely use Ruby for serious work interactively
(e.g., I do so when verifying stuff). In this case, I feel that it's
probably better that we have the ri/irb integrations that are ongoing
than docstrings.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca