From: Csaba Henk <csaba@..._for_avoiding_spam.org>
Date: 2005-02-19T11:34:46+09:00
Subject: Re: A Ruby-relevant quote from Alan Kay

On 2005-02-18, Bill Kelly <billk@cts.com> wrote:
> From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk_programming_language
>
>     One surprising feature of Smalltalk is that the traditional
>     progamming constructs: if-then-else, for, while, etc. are
>     not built into the language. All of these things are
>     implemented using objects.  For example, decisions are made
>     by sending an ifTrue: message to a Boolean object, and passing
>     a fragment of code to execute if the Boolean is True.  There
>     are only three built-in executable constructs:
>
>       - sending a message to an object; 
>       - assigning an object to a variable; 
>       - returning an object from a method; 
>
>     and a few syntactic constructs for declaring literal objects
>     and temporary variables.


> (Of course just prior to studying Smalltalk I had unwisely
> volunteered to take over a large VB6 project... If only I'd
> spent 15 minutes studying the VB6 language reference before
> agreeing to that.... Gack! :)

[ :) ]

>
>> You can define if/then/else type methods for objects with a few line of
>> Ruby code easily (without using "and", "case" and any other
>> conditional-like construct, of course, I mean it that way). I made it up
>> to have
>> 
>> loop { 
>>   gets.ifthen { 
>>     puts "you fed me a line" 
>>   }.else { 
>>     puts "bye"; exit
>>   } 
>> }
>>  
>> as valid code.

What is happening in the above ruby code snippet, is damn exactly the same as
what you've been quoting from the Wikipedia Smalltalk article, isn't it? 

(OK, I used "ifthen" and not "ifTrue", but that doesn't make a
difference.)

Cheers,
Csaba