From: Bob Kline <bkline@...>
Date: 2001-03-24T04:24:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:13155] Re: Amusing contrast

On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, Niklas Frykholm wrote:

> >I was struck by the discrepancy between this quote from the Ruby man
> >page:
> >
> >       If you want a language for easy object-oriented program-
> >       ming, or you don't like the Perl ugliness, or you do like
> >       the concept of lisp, but don't like too much parentheses,
> >       Ruby may be the language of your choice.
> >
> >and this excerpt from one of the Ruby scripts in the build package for
> >Ruby itself [1]:
> >
> >  File.foreach($config || "config.status") do |$_|
> >    next if /^#/
> >    if /^s%@(\w+)@%(.*)%g/
> >      name = $1
> >      val = $2 || ""
> >      next if /^(INSTALL|DEFS|configure_input|srcdir)$/ =~ name
> >      val.gsub!(/\$\{([^{}]+)\}/) { "$(#{$1})" }
> >      CONFIG[name] = val
> >    end
> >  end
> 
> Most of the ugliness here is caused by regexps. Regexps are inherently
> ugly, but inherently useful.
> 

No argument from me, I use them all the time.  I just found it
entertaining that the man page appeared to have been written by a
marketing droid, eager to pretend that you can't write just as ugly code
in Ruby as you can in Perl.  :->}  Folks in glass houses, and all
that....

Cheers,
Bob