[ruby-talk:16135] Re: Block arguments vs method arguments

On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 06:19:54AM +0900, Sean Russell wrote:
> 1) There are better (IMHO) solutions for the problem.  I, personally, liked 
> the earlier suggestion of defining scope with { |:var| ... }, and I'm not 
> sure whatever happened to this recommendation.
I don't like either : or < >. Someone here made the suggestion that we use ( )
instead of | | and make them to mean that its local to the block. I like this
proposal as it makes things more consistent IMO. 

> 3) An argument for ':var' over '<var>' can be made in recognizing that:
> 	my_proc { |  var1, :var2 | }
> is more flexible than
> 	my_proc { < var1, var2 > }
> I shudder to imagine that attempts to solve this might lead to declarations 
> such as:
> 	my_proc { < var1 > | var2 | }
If I remember right the var1 would behave as it does now while the :var2 would
be local. Am I right?? Why not just change | | to ( ) and then if you need to 
change a var just do

reciever.method do( arg )
	var_in_scope = arg
end

> I agree with the philosophy of keeping maximum backwards compatibility, but I 
> think that in some cases it is much better lose backwards compatibility for 
> the sake of clean syntax.  I don't think that "<...>" is powerful enough to 
> sufficiently solve the scoping "issue", and that using it is a contract for a 
> further syntactic change.
I don't agree overly much with backwards compatibility. I can undestand why
people want it but it seems to me that it hampers development and progress and
that eventually the language becomes ugly. I think we need to find a better way
of supporting backwards compatibility. Perhaps some kind of built in translation
ability?? ( just an idea ). 
> 
> 4) '<' and '>' are sharp, pointy glyphs, denoting hard, angry imagery; they 
> are unfriendly characters, and someone could get hurt using them.  Studies 
> show that people who overuse '<' and '>' are more prone to violence than 
> those who don't;  this is supported up by the fact that there are very few 
> incidences of workplace violence in Lisp-shops. (Ahem...)
lol

Sincerly,
Chris Moline