From: dblack@...
Date: 2006-05-22T01:07:57+09:00
Subject: Re: rubynuby - confused by method name "inject"

Hi --

On Mon, 22 May 2006, Timothy Hunter wrote:

>
> On May 21, 2006, at 10:42 AM, Jeff Pritchard wrote:
>
>> Following David's suggestion, I think I'll go ahead and use it, but
>> always precede it with a comment so I can remember what it does when I
>> come back to it later.  Something like:
>> 
>> # this "inject" method is "combining" the results from the block
>> operation into a single answer
>> [1,2,3,4,5].inject(0){|sum,num|sum+num}
>> 
>> 
>> This topic makes me wonder, and perhaps one of the old-timers here can
>> answer this.  If I understand it correctly, Matz basically "invented"
>> ruby.  Matz is, as far as I know, Japanese.  Was Ruby first written with
>> Japanese class and method names and later translated to English?  Or did
>> it start out in English?
>> 
>> thanks,
>> jp
>
> No, Matz has said that he wanted to create a language that could be used by 
> everybody and he realized that it would have to use English.
>
> Ruby honors its influences by reusing their names. Thus we have the 
> Smalltalk's "inject", Lisp's "mixin", C's "sprintf" and "puts", Perl's $ 
> variables, etc.

A dubious honor, in the latter case; quoting the ToDo:

* discourage use of symbol variables (e.g. $/, etc.) in manual
* discourage use of Perlish features by giving warnings.

:-)


David

-- 
David A. Black (dblack@wobblini.net)
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