From: Minkoo Seo <minkoo.seo@...>
Date: 2006-05-07T17:36:19+09:00
Subject: Re: A major ruby annoyance!

------=_Part_173_7733905.1146990976422
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline

In my case, I use -w always, and try to depend on autocompletion feature
available
in vim. (^P, ^N, ^XO)  Other than that, AFAIK, there are no alternatives in
the language
which doesn't have variable declaration feature.

Thought Ruby has syntax check facility, "ruby -wc", it does not find typos.
It just check
syntactic errors.

Sincerely,
Minkoo Seo


On 5/7/06, Talha Oktay <toktay@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am a newbie in Ruby. I have read several books including pickaxe and
> wrote
> several thousands lines of code. So far, as an ex perl user, I have found
> the major annoyance with ruby is the lack of declaration of variables.
> Automatic creation,  in perl jargon autovification is the common feature
> of
> many high level languages such as perl, paython, visual basic etc. but
> most
> of the these languages have seen that this not necessarily a good thing
> and
> created flags, commands to prohibit it if the developer wants to. I reall=
y
> wish ruby had one.  Last  several hours  I spent debugging a
> malfunctioning
> code just to see mistyped variable name was causing all the problem. I ha=
d
> to put many log statements which polluted to the code.
>
> I guess in Pickaxe book, unit testing is presented as the cure for this
> problem which I do not agree. I can not write a test code for every peace
> of
> little functionality, besides I am eager to make the compiler or
> interpreter
> to work for me. Why not tell the interpreter to check the code, instead o=
f
> writing very detailed test programs. I am not a very good typist and I
> often
> mistype variable names, often I had to depend on vim's auto completion
> feature. But I do not want to depend to an editor or an IDE for this.
>
> I have also found the ruby's -w flag does not work as I perl -w flag does=
.
> In perl warnings are really descriptive.  You can even use a module calle=
d
> diagnostics which almost teaches to fix the problem that crashes program
> or
> generates warning etc. I often do not use -w as because I receive warning=
s
> from libraries that my code includes or warnings I do not understand at
> all.
>
> May be I am the only one who is bothered with these. I do not know.
>
>

------=_Part_173_7733905.1146990976422--