From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2007-06-14T22:21:40+09:00
Subject: Re: "case when" executes a symbol as method

Francisco Laguna wrote:
> The first just prints out the symbols turned to strings ("hello" or 
> "good_day", respectively), but the second one acrually executes the 
> hello and good_day methods and the case block has the return value of 
> the methods as its own value. Pretty cool, if you ask me. How come? Is 
> that something I can rely on, or something that might disappear, because
> it's just some side-effect? 

Syntax/whitespace thing. No special meta-magic.

 > puts case greeting
 > when "Hello" :hello
 > when "Good Day" :good_day
 > end
is
 > puts case greeting
 > when "Hello": hello
 > when "Good Day": good_day
 > end
is
 > puts case greeting
 > when "Hello" then hello
 > when "Good Day" then good_day
 > end
is
 > puts case greeting
 > when "Hello"
 >   hello
 > when "Good Day"
 >   good_day
 > end

The equivalent of the first example would be:
 > puts case greeting
 > when "Hello": :hello
 > when "Good Day": :good_day
 > end