From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@...>
Date: 2000-03-16T17:53:13+00:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01917] Re: Enumerations and all that.

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Dat Nguyen wrote:

> I wonder if attempt to program in Ruby pascal alike (or for that matter any 
> other language alike) is worthwhile. Overtime people with other languages 

All languages borrow from other languages.  Enums are commen enough
(Pascal, C++, Ada, Modula-2, and to some extent C) so it is not
re-inventing Pascal.  The point is that they allow strong typing, 
in the cases where it cannot be handled by differing method calls --
for variables holding a status, for example.  If you want to be sure
that a variable cannot be set to a silly value it seems a straightforward
way to do it, and as it gives you names for numbers it makes code
more readable.   A similar thing is the range type, but that doesn't
have names, just restrictions on value.

> background would want to introduce flavors of their own. For instance I 
> innocently tried to implement matrix multiplication using nested loops like 
> I do in C, Tcl, Python, etc.

That is nothing to do with strong typing.  That is algorithmic.  

> Ruby may have its own idioms of doing things, not only at low level but also 
> conceptually like patterns. The gurus in Japan may have tons of such 
> wisdoms.

Which is why I asked about it before implementing it.
> 
> Dat
> 
	Hugh
	hgs@dmu.ac.uk