From: Charles Lowe <aquasync@...>
Date: 2007-02-17T14:16:24+09:00
Subject: Unification of variables and methods

The one thing that bothers me about ruby is the (as i see it?) separate
namespaces for locals and functions.

Variables take precedence, but you can override and get the functional
form in 2 ways:

  def x; 1; end
  x = 2
  x        # => 2
  x()      # => 1
  self.x   # => 1

1. It seems somewhat messy, and prohibits using () as a message (eg,
sending :call)

  x = proc { 1 }
  x()      # NoMethodError...
  x[]      # => 1

2a. It also leads to a more complex language to parse, and to those
interesting issues like:

  def x; 1; end
  x       # => 1
  x = 2 if false
  x       # => nil

2b. And other confusion as `*', '&' and '/' being mistaken at times,
with certain whitespace dependencies:

  def foo1; end
  foo2 = ''

  foo1 / 1  # this / is division
  foo1 /1   # this / starts an (as-yet unterminated) regexp.
  foo2 / 1  # this / is division also
  foo2 /1   # this / is also division! yet actually IRB trips up, looks
            # for the rest of /, then gives a SyntaxError on
compilation.

  a = [1, 2]
  foo1 * a  # * means splat
  foo2 * b  # * means multiply


I don't understand why they both just can't get along? :)
(ie at least in the same namespace, optionally with parsing not
dependent on the guessed type).

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