From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2001-11-26T10:29:56+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26481] Re: Table: Ruby versus Smalltalk,  Objective-C,      C++,  Java;

Avi Bryant wrote:
> However, not all cases where closures are wrapped by macros in lisp
> are as easily replicated in Ruby.  For example, assuming Ruby blocks
> introduced a new lexical scope (which they unfortunately don't, but
> never mind), the expansion of a lisp let statement in ruby looks like:
> 
> proc{|x, y| do_something() }.call(a,b)
> 
> This can be improved to:
> 
> let(a,b){|x, y| do_something() }
> 
> but it still ain't as pretty as lisp.

There is also

  for x,y in [["a","b"]] do z=x+y end

Syntax is prettier, but this example reinforces your point about lexical
scope and blocks--'z' stays in scope.

> And of course there are scores of uses for macros that have nothing to
> do with closures.  A classic one is embedding domain-specific
> dialects, such as lispified HTML - the ruby cgi library is nice, but
> it's not as clean or as general as the typical

I'd vote for some kind of hygienic macro in Ruby, so we could create
embedded languages with clean, idiomatic syntax.

--
Joel VanderWerf                          California PATH, UC Berkeley
mailto:vjoel@path.berkeley.edu                     Ph. (510) 231-9446
http://www.path.berkeley.edu                       FAX (510) 231-9512