From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-10-02T15:51:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Can you please help to make decision?

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 04:58:10AM +0900, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 03:25:37AM +0900, 7stud -- wrote:
> > Here's a simple test for the op.  Which of the following do you think is 
> > easier to understand?  Can you guess what each program does?
> > 
> > language1:
> > --------
> > 
> > colors = ["red", "blue", "green"]
> > 
> > colors.each {|color| puts color}
> > 
> > 
> > language2:
> > ---------
> > colors = ["red", "green", "blue"]
> > 
> > for color in colors:
> >     print color
> 
> In the case of someone who has never programmed before, I rather think
> "colors.each {|color| puts color}" might be less confusing than "for
> color in colors:\n  print color".  I have never in my life seen anything
> in plain English that even began to look like "for color in colors", and
> the meaning of that clause is non-obvious.  Meanwhile, "colors.each" at
> least looks like it's saying something about each of something, with the
> "each" attached obviously to the "colors", suggesting that it's saying
> "for each element of the colors array".
> 
> The only way the Python one looks anything like "more intuitive" to
> someone who has never encountered Ruby or Python before, as far as I can
> tell, is if that person is familiar with C.

. . . and while I'm at it, I think this might be even more easily
understood (ignoring for a moment the variable sigils):

  @colors = ("red", "blue", "green")

  print foreach @colors;

On the other hand, I doubt you want to advocate Perl -- particularly if
you're a Pythonista.  Also, as others have pointed out, the Ruby iterator
could just be replaced with `puts colors`.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1)
Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk
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