From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2005-07-20T09:05:07+09:00
Subject: Re: `not' in parameter lists

Daniel Brockman wrote:

>This message ended up getting pretty long and off-topic,
>with lots of jabbering about syntax, and ending with a
>shameless plug.  So read it at your own risk.
>  
>
Yeah. Sorry, the disclaimer encouraged me to put off reading this for a day.

>>    assert ((foo.respond_to? :bar) and (plurgh.include? :mif))
>>
>>Difficult to read and understand?
>>    
>>
>
>Not particularly, but a little.  I'm not used to that style,
>which I guess is why I actually consider the full-blown Lisp
>syntax more readable:
>
>   (assert (and (foo.respond_to? :bar) (plurgh.include? :mif)))
>
>Of course, the conventional Ruby style is just as readable:
>
>   assert foo.respond_to?(:bar) && plurgh.include?(:mif)
>  
>
Yeah, my Lisp-with-commas description was always slightly 
tongue-in-cheek. I find (method *arguments) more readable than 
method(*arguments) though, especially in a nest of stuff.

Yeah, the Ruby one's alright...

>   (case
>     (when (bar.respond-to? :moomin)
>       (puts "snufkin")
>     (else
>       (something-or-other))
>  
>
I dunno. Unnecessary parens, IMO. Also, I don't like putting a close 
paren/closing tag/end keyword at the end of a line unless the open 
paren/open tag/begin keyword is at the beginning of the same line. That 
way it's easier to spot code that's missing an end-tag. (And you can't 
give up the end-tag unless you want significant whitespace.) Joel 
Spolsky has a decent piece on making wrong code *look* wrong. Of course, 
in it, he advocates Hungarian notation, but one can look past that to 
see the meat of the article... :)

>Therefore, I think the parentheses of a last-parameter
>nested method call should be optional, analogously to the
>implicit hash syntax.
>
OK, for what it's worth, I like.

>Maybe you'd be interested in a preprocessor[2] that lets you
>use hyphens instead of underscores?
>
Yeek. Preprocessors = evil! Granted, this one's written in plain Ruby, 
which is neat, but still. If I could just say require 'hyphen-ruby' and 
not __END__ at the beginning of the code...

>   @timers.each { .fire if .ready? }
>  
>
That's neat.

Devin
eat_program. hehe...