From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder@...>
Date: 2008-05-19T06:45:02+09:00
Subject: Re: A Couple of Questions Regarding Ruby Style

Gary Wright wrote:
> On May 16, 2008, at 3:50 PM, Michael W. Ryder wrote:
>> I also noticed that x  = .25 is not allowed
> 
> Float literals must have digits to the left of
> the decimal to avoid ambiguity with method calls:
> 
>    x = 0.25
> 
That I figured out a while ago.  My comment was that x = .25 is not 
allowed but x = ".25".to_f or x = Float(".25") is.  Many older languages 
allow x=.25 so having to place the leading zero is a sticking point as I 
am still not used to having to use it.
My main point was the "inconsistency" of a couple of methods that I 
thought were synonyms for each other.  This is a real problem for me as 
I keep having to experiment to find the correct method and usage for the 
desired results.  It took me a while to figure out how to get my coerce 
method to return Rational numbers rather than Floats.  The examples in 
Pickaxe and in the rational.rb library all returned Floats.  I finally 
figured out that rather than calling x.coerce(self) I had to call 
self.coerce(x).  A simple change, like using Integer(x) rather than 
x.to_i for converting to Integers to avoid a problem with "0xa" 
returning 0 rather than the expected 10.


> Gary Wright
>