From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2007-10-20T19:29:19+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby wish-list

Hi,

In message "Re: ruby wish-list"
    on Sat, 20 Oct 2007 08:20:33 +0900, Suraj Kurapati <snk@gna.org> writes:

|1. Use "new" as the name of the constructor instead of "initialize". 
|You can keep "initialize" around for legacy support; just "alias 
|initialize new" for the future.

Besides that renaming hook like "initialize" is far more difficult
than you expect, I don't think "new" is sufficient name for instance
initialization hook.

|2. Fix the Ruby parser to treat // (literal regexp) just like the 
|%r{...} (also literal regexp) construct so that you aren't forced to use 
|parentheses in method calls:
|
|  $ ruby -v
|  ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i686-linux]
|
|  $ ruby -w -e '"foo".sub /o$/, "x"'
|  -e:1: warning: ambiguous first argument; put parentheses or even spaces

No matter how much you hate this warning, ambiguity would not go away.
If you don't put parentheses around arguments, the parser confuses
division operator (/) and regular expression at the first argument.

							matz.