From: Piers Cawley <pdcawley@...>
Date: 2001-08-07T19:51:38+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19279] Re: Some remarks from a nembie in Ruby

Niklas Frykholm <r2d2@acc.umu.se> writes:
> On Mon, Aug 06, 2001 at 05:24:47PM +0900, Renaud HEBERT wrote:
> > 17) the "automatic" declaration of local variables may be dangerous,
> > does the equivalent of Perl "use strict" exist? Same question with the
> > equivalent of "perl -w".
> 
> In Perl, if you forget to declare a local variable you get a global
> variable.

Not if you're doing the right thing and using strict you don't. You
get a compilation error.

> Also in Perl, you can do lots of things to undefined variables, such as "$i +=
> 1". In Ruby you get warnings.  Because Ruby is less dangerous, "use strict" is
> not really needed.  Ruby does not have any way of declaring variables, so it is
> unclear how something similar to "use strict" would work. 
> 
> For example, look at the following
> 
> 	niklas = 1
> 	niklas += 1
> 	puts niklas
> 
> If you misspell the first niklas you get an error on line 2 because niklas is
> nil. If you misspell the second niklas you get an error on line 2, because
> your misspell is nil. If you misspell the third niklas you get an error on that
> line. So it is not so easy to bite yourself in the foot.

Good point.

-- 
Piers Cawley
www.iterative-software.com