From: Josef 'Jupp' Schugt <jupp@...>
Date: 2007-03-26T08:23:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Suggestion: swap name of "puts" and "print" and rename "puts" to "put_s"

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> I'd like to suggest that the functionality of the names "puts" and
> "print" should be swapped so that "print" automatically sends a newline=

> character and "puts" doesn't.

Note that Ruby is written in C and that C's "puts" does return
carriage while its "printf" does not. Also note that POLS (principle
of least surprise) precisely taken is POLS2YM (principle of least
surprise to Yukikiro Matsumoto). Your suggestion seems to violate
this principle.

But now that you bring up the subject: What about adding a consistent
definition of write and write_ln? This would only change very little
and - which IMHO is important - does not unbearable introduce version
incompatibility. Changing the name of the basic output functions
would surely break literally every Ruby program. In other words: The
cost of changing them is much larger than the cost of living with
this kind of Altlast ("legacy" is one possible translation for this
word but it has quite a lot of other meanings as well, see
dict.leo.org or similar).

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt
--=20
Blog available at http://www.mynetcologne.de/~nc-schugtjo/blog/
PGP key with id 6CC6574F available at http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net/


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