From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-09-21T23:52:03+09:00
Subject: Re: the point of omitting parentheses

On 9/21/06, devdev <adeveloper.google@elitefrontier.com> wrote:
> The point of being able to omit parentheses is to make it easier to
> write Domain Specific Languages (DSLs).The lack of parentheses makes it
> easier to create DLSs that consist of declared syntaxes or grammars,
> but have the DSL itself still be pure Ruby. Also by parentheses being
> optional, we can create a DSL for Ruby itself, in effect creating
> constructs which look and act like reserve word extensions to Ruby.

I would say that that's this year's 'point'.  For me, I just think
that they are ugly.

I only use them in two places, personally:
1. When the left-hand side of a ternary starts to look scary:
x = (foo == baz.something) ? this : the_other

2. Method definitions, since I find they draw the eye better than without.
def thingy x, y, *z, &block  vs. def thingy(x, y, *z, &block)

DSLs are cool, but even if they didn't exist, I would still want to be
able to omit parens.