From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2008-05-20T23:55:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Method as first class member

2008/5/20 Guoliang Cao <caogl@verizon.net>:
> Robert Klemme wrote:

>> With these questions I always ask myself what do we gain by such a
>> change?  All changes have some effort attached, some more and some less.
>>   But it's not worthwhile if the effort outweighs the benefits.  What do
>> you think are the benefits of this change?  Why should we do it?
>
> I believe we get shorter, more intuitive code with this kind of syntax,
> and partial invocation can help DRY in a lot of cases. Compare below
> examples, what do you prefer? IMHO, the former syntax attracts
> programmers to use, the latter is like, do this if you have to(this may
> not be a bad thing though)
>
> "foo"->length
> "foo".method :length

How often is this used?  I rarely see this so I would say, don' t
bother.  Also, sometimes it can be helpful to be more verbose to
clarify that something special is happening there.  Also, having a
rusty C and C++ background I would expect the first syntax to actually
execute the method and not return a meta data object.

Partial specialization might be a different story but I did not have
use for that either.  IMHO making Ruby a functional language does not
work too well.  And actually you *can* have partial specialization
with lambdas.

> I do agree changes require efforts and also add learning burden to
> users, language designers/implementers have to be very careful with any
> change to the language. However, most programmers have a dream - a
> perfect language. Even it may not become true, we are closer than ever.
> Do you agree?

No.  I for my part do not dream of a perfect language because I do not
believe something like that is possible.  Also, I do not believe that
your proposed change would be an improvement worthwhile considering.
I prefer to use Ruby the way it is vs. worrying too much about
improvements.

Kind regards

robert


-- 
use.inject do |as, often| as.you_can - without end