From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-06-04T23:50:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Introducing the "it" keyword

On 04.06.2007 16:29, Eleanor McHugh wrote:
> On 3 Jun 2007, at 20:45, Robert Klemme wrote:
>> On 03.06.2007 19:34, Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>>> I tend to agree, although that's because I'd really like Ruby to have 
>>> the 'with' syntactic sugar that VB has. I also much prefer the idea 
>>> of being able to choose my own block variable name rather than being 
>>> stuck with 'it' which to my eye is an ungainly word. It still bothers 
>>> me though that a formulation that's intended to make for a simple 
>>> atomic statement would now cover three lines onscreen...
>>
>> I believe Ruby does not have "with" because there is instance_eval - 
>> it's more to type but can be easily aliased and has the same effect - 
>> rebinding "self".  (I know that some talk about another "with", that 
>> rebinds arbitrary variable names.  But I believe the original idea of 
>> "with" was, that you could invoke methods without explicit receiver).
> 
> It's not entirely clear to me that 'instance_eval' would obey the same 
> scoping rules as 'with' in VB by dint of introducing a block.

I'm not too familiar with VB (I'm kinda happy that I could stay away 
from it.) so I cannot really comment on the scoping question.

> I also 
> just happen to prefer the syntactic form in the same way that there are 
> people who routinely use 'for' statements in their Ruby code.

Tastes, tastes...  Well, you can of course have your "with":

module Kernel
private
   def with(obj, &b)
     obj.instance_eval(&b)
   end
end

with "foo" do
   puts length
end
# same as
"foo".instance_eval do
   puts length
end

:-)

Kind regards

	robert


PS: Thanks for teaching me another British(?) English idiom - hadn't 
known "by dint of" so far. :-)