From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2005-03-23T01:24:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Paul Graham recommends Ruby

Hi --

On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Steven Shaw wrote:

> David A. Black wrote:
>
>> Rather,
>> the question is: if Ruby had been designed from the ground up with a
>> literal function constructor, would it have been {|| } ?
>
> Do you mean syntactically? Like instead of Smalltalk like [| ]? or something 
> else?

I mean if Matz had wanted such a constructor from the beginning, what
would he have chosen?  So much of the discussion of this and other
changes to Ruby involve just trying to find combinations of
punctuation that aren't already taken....

>>  If so, then
>> fine.  If not, then {|| } would be an add-on that is not properly
>> integrated into the language.
>
> and here, more specifically, "not properly integrated into the language 
> syntax"?

"Properly" meaning "in a non-afterthought way".  I'm afraid I can't
express it any more technically than that.  But think of all the
things in Perl and Python about which people say: that was slapped on
after the language was already designed.  There is essentially none of
that in Ruby, which I think is a great situation and one that should
be conserved.


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net