From: Morton Goldberg <m_goldberg@...>
Date: 2007-10-10T07:24:05+09:00
Subject: Re: parts of speech in Ruby

On Oct 9, 2007, at 5:06 PM, Chad Perrin wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 10:33:21AM +0900, Morton Goldberg wrote:
>> On Oct 8, 2007, at 5:44 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?
>>
>> I think it might be consider a copula. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/
>> wiki/Copula>.
>
> Okay . . . so what programming language syntactic element is  
> analogous to
> a coupla?
>
> verb = method
> noun = object
> coupla = ?

I am suggesting, very tentatively, that

copula = variable binding

Regards, Morton