From: Charles D Hixson <charleshixsn@...>
Date: 2001-09-23T02:43:52+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21549] Re: Replacement for __FILE__ == $0

On Friday 21 September 2001 06:05 pm, you wrote:
> ...
> I am always reluctant to add new keywords or methods to
> core classes. Using require 'English' (which I wasn't aware
> of) is reasonable in this case, although I would argue that
> $0 is nearly useless as-is, and so should be aliased.
> Having a perl background shouldn't be a prerequisite for
> using Ruby.
>...
> Kevin
...

The $0 notation isn't strictly Perl.  I first encountered it when 
being introduced to the first edition of the Macintosh MPW.  They 
had taken it in from Unix, but I don't think that Perl was around 
then.  I think that they got it from grep (regular expressions).  
And that was just a small twist from C's command argument 
addressing, where the command arguments were stored in a 0 based 
array, with the name of the command being the first argument (i.e., 
arg[0]).
-- 
 Charles Hixson
 
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