From: MonkeeSage <MonkeeSage@...>
Date: 2007-12-10T20:10:03+09:00
Subject: Re: How much would variable declarations in Ruby make you wince?

On Dec 8, 6:51 pm, "Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality"
<ihates...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>     The two most popular sources of bugs for me when programming in Ruby
> are:
>
> 1)  Passing the wrong object as a parameter to a method.
> 2)  Accidentally creating a new variable.

1.) How does predeclaration help?

var l = [1,2,3]
var h = {:a=>"b"}
wants_an_array(h) # => error

2.) While that may alleviate the typo problem, it introduces another
class of bugs which are just as subtle:

var list = create_useful_list
if should_modify_list(list)
    # I meant to modify the variable "list" here...
    var list = modify_list(list)
end
use_list(list)

Once one became accustomed to typing "var", there is every chance that
it would be used places where a pre-existing variable was meant, but
the "var" just got typed out of habit.

Regards,
Jordan