[ruby-talk:19295] Re: Some remarks from a nembie in Ruby

Renaud HEBERT <[e-mail]> wrote:
> ts wrote:
> []
> >  Personnaly I find strange that it's always the beginners which want change
> > completely a language :-))
> > 
> > Guy Decoux
> 
> I wouldn't call this "changing completely the language":
> - the octal notation is merely syntactical sugar for "consistency
> purpose"
> - the addition of "getlines without end-of-line" methods is a suggestion
> to avoid portability nightmares: hardly a complete change.
> 
> While it may be too pretentious, I noted what bothered me on the fist
> reading of the book, because afterwards you get "too used" to the
> 'little quircks' of the language and you can't see what is bothering the
> newbies..

They're not quirks.  They're simply how the language is defined.  It also 
seems that a lot of people are expecting Ruby to act like Perl when they 
first try it.  Ruby is _not_ Perl with a different syntax, it's a completely 
separate language which has the opportunity to do a lot of things right 
(like, for example, not making 0 and "" false.  They're #zero? and #empty?, 
and most certainly not boolean false.)

I wasn't bothered much with Ruby as a beginner other than the functional 
programming aspects of it taking some getting used to.  I treat Ruby as its 
own language, though.

-- 
 Brian Fundakowski Feldman           \  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!  /
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