From: Daniel DeLorme <dan-ml@...42.com>
Date: 2007-01-20T15:26:59+09:00
Subject: Re: auto assign arguments?

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> I thought (and I still think) it is a good idea to separate method
> argument and assignment in general.  It's convention supported by most
> languages, and mixing parameters and assignments gives me impression
> of toy-language.

That's interesting. Would you mind sharing your insight on why these should be 
separated? To me they seem similar enough to be "merged". I think the only 
reason to separate them is because, at the machine-language level, function 
arguments are PUSHed onto the stack while assignments are MOVed to memory. So 
historically they come from different mechanisms. But if we agree that computer 
languages should be designed for humans, not computers, it seems more natural to 
view parameters as a specialized case of assignment.

> Besides that, I think formal arguments of a method (including their
> names) can be seen as part of class API.  Allowing instance variables
> as formal arguments seems like disclosing the internal issues.

I can see the number of arguments (and in other languages, their type) as part 
of the class API, but not their names since those variables' names are local to 
the method. True, rdoc exposes those internals in the documentation, but then it 
also exposes the instance variables & methods used for default values. For 
consistency I think instance variables should be allowed as parameters since 
they are allowed as default values. But I acknowledge that consistency may not 
be the most important factor to consider here.

I dunno, forbidding instance variables may be the more "correct" approach but I 
think allowing them would be more useful. One of the reasons I like ruby is 
because it favors usefulness over strict "correctness" (e.g. you can still get 
to private methods if you really need it)

just my 2円

Daniel