From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date: 2005-10-12T20:42:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Default argument values for blocks

Selon Thomas <sanobast-2005a@yahoo.de>:

>
> I was dreaming for a long time of a ruby dialect that has all these
> fancy arrows haskell has. Everybody proposing arrows, please (try to)
> read some haskell code.
>

I have and can only concur. The arrows make things pretty confusing in most
places.

> But seriosly, I personally would prefer something in the line lambda(x,
> y=1) {...} as it was proposed by other people too.
>

The problem is that "collection.each lambda(foo="bar") {puts foo}" has to be the
ugliest and most long-winded thing I've seen in a long time. It's OK for making
a Proc, but to use as a block it's just plain wrong.

However, it's nearly impossible a problem to solve. Any solution will probably
look rather awful. We just need to find the least offensive one :) . Unless one
finds a way to parse "{|foo="bar"| puts foo}" correctly. That'd be the best
solution.

> The => in the hash syntax is IMHO already one kind of arrow too much.
>

Hasn't a change been accepted that allows one to use ":" as an alternative to
"=>" in hashes?

Hey, what about ":(foo="bar"){puts foo}"? It's still not beautiful but it's
still less annoying, and in Ruby we are already used to see colons at the
beginning of a word. Of course, overloading ":" may not be considered a good
idea, but it shouldn't be a parsing problem as this one would always be
followed by a "(" (and that doesn't happen with symbols). And:

collection.each:(foo="bar"){puts foo}

isn't that bad :) .
--
Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.