From: Conrad Schneiker <schneik@...>
Date: 2001-03-20T17:55:36+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:12929] Re: animal is onion as show stopper

Apparently sleep-deprived Hal wrote:

# Fritz Heinrichmeyer wrote:
# >
# > This p animal -> onion thing is a complete show stopper in using
# > ruby.
# >
# > It is boring that i have to type "my" all the time in perl, but at
# > least i am able to.
# >
# 
# Oh, come now.
# 
# Is your program so big you've run out
# of possible variable names?

Oh, come now. 

Is this any way to win Ruby converts?

Well, I didn't think so. :-)

I think many people are mainly concerned with *unintentional* aspects
of this issue, and that you have to double check a lot of stuff to be
reasonably sure about what is going on, especially if you are dealing
with other people's code--which is the unfortunate fate of most of the
world's programmers much of the time.

I don't know the history of 'my' in Perl, but I'd wager that the gurus
involved had a lot of prior experience *without* it, and that such
experience was a major cause for *adding* it. (Why they took the 'my'
route is another issue--I suspect that possibly nicer solutions were
precluded by the entropic MONSTER of backwards compatibility.)

Of course, to save typing and horribly cluttering up 'strict' code,
I would prefer 'not_my' to 'my', but I hope someone has a
very much better alternative to either of these.

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)