From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2005-08-05T08:22:46+09:00
Subject: Re: new block notation (was: Re: ruby-dev summary 26468-26661)

Hi,

In message "Re: new block notation (was: Re: ruby-dev summary 26468-26661)"
    on Fri, 5 Aug 2005 07:55:54 +0900, Eric Mahurin <eric_mahurin@yahoo.com> writes:

|So before, the experiment was this (no default args and
|ambiguities with Hash):
|
|f = { |a| ... }
|
|and now you are thinking about this:
|
|f = ->(a) { ... }
|
|To me, this suffers readability because there are too many
|symbols in a row: =->(   Wasn't this kind of thing the primary
|problem with perl - too many punctuation characters made it
|difficult to read.

I don't agree.  Punctuation symbol nor sequence of them itself is not
a problem.  The problems can be caused by context dependent
interpretation of symbols, I think.

|It seems like you are between a rock and a hard place
|(preserving backwards compatibility) to solve this problem.  I
|don't see one great solution.  The best I can come up with is
|to use syntax like we have now except a) use symbols other than
|| that allow no ambiguity in the expressions (I think :+space
|would work), and b) force an argument list to not cause
|ambiguities.  So you'd have this:
|
|f = { : a,b=1|2 : ... }
|f = { : * : ... } # equivalent to f = lambda { ... }

Unfortunately :+space causes conflicts as well.

							matz.