From: ES <ruby-ml@...>
Date: 2005-03-23T05:57:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Paul Graham recommends Ruby


In data 3/22/2005, "David A. Black" <dblack@wobblini.net> ha scritto:

>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.

I absolutely agree with you on this and can see how this would be a
concern for this particular addition. To me the current HEAD version,
where {||} must be used for a no-argument proc definition, falls in
this category; while it's useful to be able to omit 'lambda' etc.,
this method of doing it feels distinctly tacked-on. I'm certainly
sympathetic to whoever is writing the parser, of course, and I wouldn't
mind the proposed [:]-syntax for Hashes.

I maintain that this all could be solved with an unification of all
callable code into a single first-order function definition :)

>David

E