From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2006-10-07T08:38:17+09:00
Subject: Re: What is the reason for this syntax?

Kevin Olemoh wrote:
> 
> I'm very glad I bothered to bring this up since at least now I have a
> workaround until such time that the defacto requirement for K&R style
> indentation with respect to blocks is removed.  I doubt any of us
> would think it good to disallow the use of single letter variables in
> Ruby simply because the makers all happen to think that single letter
> variables are bad formatting. (Which they are but as long as you keep
> them to blocks they are fine in Ruby anyway.) People would be better
> served encouraging people to use comments in code other people could
> reasonably be expected to need or want to read rather than forcing
> users to use obscure forms of some structures, or building in silly
> things like syntactic indentation that expects you to judge whitespace
> for the beggining and ending of  various things.

You're misunderstanding. It's not that anyone particularly was in love
with that style of brace-matching. It's just a consequence of the
language's syntax, based on features considered more important than
that kind of flexibility in pairing braces.

If you make semicolons optional, I don't know that there is any way
around the problem you perceive.

FWIW, I used to be troubled by this also. In a matter of weeks, I
got over it.


Hal