From: raja@... (Raja S.)
Date: 2001-10-26T04:54:42+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23342] Issues with white space [was Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby]

Johann Hibschman <johann@physics.berkeley.edu> writes:

> Furthermore, it has a parser that just leaves me feeling worried, since
> whitespace between tokens is important.  Having syntactically important
> whitespace at the beginning of lines is clear; it's all in one place,
> simple.  Having it within lines seems just as bad, if not worse.

My latest episode wtih white space messing up semantics was along the
following lines:

puts( (8 + 20) / 2 )   => 14

puts( (8 +
       20) / 2 )       => 14

puts( (    8
        + 20) / 2)     => 10   !!

Took me a good while to track this one down.  Was trying to average the
return value of two method calls:

avg  =  (  meth1( ... )
         + meth2( ... )) / 2

doesn' work but

avg  =  (  meth1( ... ) +
           meth2( ... )) / 2

does

I was under the impression that parens around a multi-line expression should
resolve this type of problem ?

Raja