From: Joao Pedrosa <joaopedrosa@...>
Date: 2005-02-14T07:52:36+09:00
Subject: Re: mandatory braces

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 07:38:09 +0900, craig duncan
<craig-duncan@earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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:

I think that one of the things that make Ruby what it is is the
general flexibility of its syntax. The other day I saw this in an
example for Rails:

{= foo.flash['bar'] if foo.flash['bar'] }

or Something... See? The flexibility paid off for the guy that wanted
to use it like that.

I generally avoid such constructions, mind you. But I know that one
line is better than 3 lines, depending on the situation. :-)

If you take a look at the code of Rails you will see code evaluations
and whatnot that are much better in Ruby than in other languages that
support RTTI / Reflection.


>   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

At least you got an error. :-)

Cheers,
Joao