From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2005-10-18T16:36:58+09:00
Subject: Re: A couple of questions/statements from a Ruby neohacker

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> Selon Dave Bettin <me@davebettin.com>:
>
>>
>> 1) Consistency in naming/coding conventions. The standard library
>> module and class list is not the prettiest thing to look at. Is
>> there a standard for naming/coding conventions in Ruby? I believe it
>> is very important for Ruby to have consistency with its conventions.
>>
>
> Classes/modules are in CamelCase, methods are with_underscores. For
> the rest, I find personally that the standard library looks quite
> nice. To each his own.

Well, that's probably because you got used to it.  But there are more
conventions and some of them are violated even by the std lib:

 - boolean query method identifiers end with a question mark "?"
([].empty?)

 - destructive method identifiers end with an exclamation mark

>> a=[1,2,3]
=> [1, 2, 3]
>> b=a.reverse
=> [3, 2, 1]
>> a
=> [1, 2, 3]
>> a.reverse!
=> [3, 2, 1]
>> a
=> [3, 2, 1]
>> a.delete! 2
NoMethodError: undefined method `delete!' for [3, 2, 1]:Array
        from (irb):14

Ooops!

>> a.delete 2
=> 2
>> a
=> [3, 1]

Ah!

See also recent threads here.

>> 3) Finally, the unixisms in the library. Face it we live in a
>> heterogeneous world and these libraries must face this reality. I
>> understand the ancestry of Ruby is  unix but will we see better
>> system abstractions for the libraries in the future? Maybe the
>> answer to number will this question too.
>
> I don't know what you're talking about. Before I moved to Linux I
> used Ruby exclusively on Windows and have never seen anything unixist
> that prevented me to do what I want (except iconv, but that has been
> solved since then, and will be built-in in Ruby2). So I don't believe
> it's a problem.

I'm also interested in hearing which Unixisms are present and what things
they make harder / prevent.

Kind regards

    robert