From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2005-02-14T00:29:35+09:00
Subject: Re: mandatory braces

Hi --

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005, Johannes Ahl-mann wrote:

> hi,
>
> i've been playing around with ruby a bit and have a proposal to make.
> i am sure that ruby won't adopt it right away and maybe it goes too much
> against the ruby way. also, if this has been discussed earlier here, i
> apologize for not researching ;-))
>
> if ruby made braces (the round ones ;-) mandatory this would produce
> some very nice effects and break nothing except for backward compatibility
> (i think). regarding the backward compatibility one could even introduce
> a new command-line switch to explicitely activate the "new" syntax.
> a few things would become possible:
>
> - differentiation between method bindings and method applications, i.e.
> 		"function1(function2)" instead of "function1(method(:function2))
> - procedure objects could be treated similarly to functions:
> 		"myproc()" instead of "myproc.call()"

I don't think that's desireable, and probably not feasible.  Consider:

   def x; end
   x = lambda {}
   x()            # which is it?

Not an example of great programming, but definitely legal.

> - ruby code would look more uniform, because at the moment the mixing
> 	of braces and no-braces drives me crazy *gg*
>
> - on the negative side this would force braces for methods "yield",
> 	"print", "puts", "break", etc.
>
> please tell me whether this is a bad idea,

It's a bad idea :-)

I agree that the mixing of styles looks bad, and I wish people would
stick reasonably close to traditional style, which generally does not
use empty parens except for super(), one-line method definitions, and
meth() as an alternative to self.meth.  I fear that that battle is
being lost on several fronts (camelcase, extra (), tab stops more than
2, etc.), but I still root for it.

Anyway -- in addition to adding visual clutter, and being redundant
(since the . already means that a method is going to be called), I
think mandatory () would weaken attribute/accessor semantics.  You'd
end up with:

   person.age()

which just shouts "This is a method call with zero arguments!" without
adding any new information, since

   person.age

already tells you that.  (Assuming there's no argument after it :-)


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net