From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2005-08-06T16:57:20+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 Sat, 6 Aug 2005 00:26:17 +0900, Florian Gro� <florgro@gmail.com> writes:

|Why not go with  lambda(arg-list) { body }  or  fun(arg-list) { body } 
|or  def(arg-list) { body }  then? I think that the syntax would point 
|out that this is more than a method that turns a block into an object 
|and I think that it would be a simple solution.

Introducing a new reserved word possibly break existing code.  Besides
that, there's no good candidate for a new keyword: lambda is too
awkward, def is not sufficient since we don't define anything here,
and I expect the name fun is used everywhere as local variable names.

"->" might appear weird at first.  But it doesn't break any code.
Pure addition to the current syntax.  And it's short enough to
encourage functional programming.  The last one is my optimistic
estimation.  There's an opposite possibility that it would be used
only to obfuscate code.

							matz.