From: craig duncan <craig-duncan@...>
Date: 2005-02-14T07:38:09+09:00
Subject: Re: mandatory braces

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()"
> - 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,
> 
> Johannes

I agree (with others) that this exact idea isn't so good.  Why should you have to use 
parens when a method has no args?  But the one flaw that has bothered me about ruby 
is that _too much_ flexibility in parsing is allowed.  I'd like it if parens were 
required around a method call's arguments.  The savings in leaving them off i find 
less than desirable as i (personally) find it _harder_ to parse things out, visually. 
  Not to mention that i think the following is ridiculous:

  s='abc'
=> "abc"
irb(main):002:0> (s.length -1).downto(0) { |i| p i }
ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)
         from (irb):2:in `length'
         from (irb):2
irb(main):003:0> (s.length - 1).downto(0) { |i| p i }
2
1
0
=> 2