From: Marc Heiler Date: 2007-12-11T10:18:30+09:00 Subject: Re: How much would variable declarations in Ruby make you wi Hi, to respond briefly towards > "There are actually at least two measures that help preventing this: 1. > use an editor with proper syntax indentation and highlighting." [...] > "2. Exercise the habit to enter matching pairs always together before you > enter the content What makes you believe I do not already? ;) But editor aside, there is a huge difference in visually appealing on something. The greatest IDE can make Java [*1] look great, folding away all the ugly bits, but under the hood it still remains ugly and needlessly verbose. Your brain adapts to the ugliness and blends away the yucky parts, but the ugliness is still there, and the great editor just conceals it, like a veil. In this regard, I do find no "end" visually _more_ appealing to my eyes than an existing "end". Or multiple ones, if one chose to rely on heavy if-else branching. It is not without reason that people prefer python or ruby these days compared to perl. Years ago perl had no real competition, it was still used heavily (and still is), but was it visually really appealing? I think I wrote only about 100 .pl scripts, compared to around 2000 .rb files so far. I never had the impression that perl bothered at all about visual elegance. It is not a question of habit. Habit changes over time, you adapt anyway. You have to use "workarounds" everywhere too and can use your editor to easen up the workload. It is a question of beauty and elegance. This is a more general remark, don't think I am focusing only on 'end' - 'end' is not that important anyway ;) [*1] Replace Java with another language as you see fit. I could mention (((lisp))) but I am afraid i would get (burned) ... -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.