From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2007-10-09T11:38:06+09:00 Subject: Re: parts of speech in Ruby Jason Perkins wrote: > > On Oct 8, 2007, at 4:44 PM, Chad Perrin wrote: > >> I'm curious -- exactly what class of syntactic element is `=` in Ruby, >> where "class of syntactic element" is roughly analogous to "part of >> speech". If objects are nouns and methods are verbs, that means `=` is >> neither a noun nor a verb. Is it a participle? Is it punctuation? If >> it's a participle, I'd like to know what class of syntactic element that >> is in Ruby. If it's punctuation, I'd like some explanation for how that >> works conceptually -- because I think of punctuation in Ruby as being >> stuff like the parentheses around a method argument. >> >> Anyone? Bueller? > > Wouldn't it be a linking verb, such as 'is'? > > > > -- > Jason Perkins > jperkins@sneer.org > > "The key to performance is elegance, not > battalions of special cases." > > -Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy > > > > In Pascal, "a := b" is normally read as "a becomes b". So in Ruby, I would translate "a = b" as "a becomes a reference to b".