From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2008-05-29T19:13:29+09:00
Subject: Re: OOP in Ruby?

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Dave Bass <davebass@musician.org> wrote:

> I suppose the need to prepend "lambda" is a good thing in that it gives
> you the flexibility of choosing whether you want to make your block into
> an object or not, whereas in Smalltalk presumably all blocks are
> automatically objects. There may be some small overhead associated with
> this, I don't know.
I am not sure, is it not simply a question of optimization, assume this case

def a &blk
end
a {}
Ruby could not create an object for {}, but does it, I do not think so
for 1.8, maybe in 1.9?

Same thing in Smalltalk
...
[ :i | i + 1 ].
...
Smalltalk could as well not compile this code at all or create a NOP,
probably most Smalltalk implementations will ignore it I guess
>
> Declaring blocks with "lambda" is a bit like declaring variables before
> you can use them, something I miss with Ruby.
And I am missing your unit tests, that said it might be a good feature
safeguarding you against typos in quick hacks sometimes.
Overall I still think it is not worth it, maybe your methods are a tad
too long too?

Cheers
Robert