From: Randy Kramer <rhkramer@...>
Date: 2007-10-09T20:42:54+09:00
Subject: Re: parts of speech in Ruby

On Tuesday 09 October 2007 12:45 am, Morton Goldberg wrote:
> On Oct 8, 2007, at 10:38 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
> > 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".
> 
> It's more "a becomes a reference to the object b is referencing", or  
> better yet "a is now bound to the same object as b [is bound to]". My  
> suggestion identifying "=" with the English copula is very tentative.  
> It's probably futile to try to force English syntactic terminology  
> onto Ruby.

(A newbie (or slow learning oldbie) lurker chiming in):  If you're a *nix 
user, a way of thinking about it that seems to help me (because I think now I 
finally am beginning to understand it) is as analogous to a hard link in 
Linux--a and b are alternate names for an object, and a = b is the act of 
creating the alternate name a.

So maybe (I'm thinking about this) I'd read a = b as one of:

   * create a new name a for b
   * (hard) link a to b
   * ???

(I call it a hard link instead of a soft link because I think the hard link is 
a closer analogy.)

Randy Kramer