From: Charles D Hixson <charleshixsn@...>
Date: 2002-01-20T04:51:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Proc.class vs yield : propose keyword procs

On Friday 18 January 2002 15:59, you wrote:
> That's a slippery slope to smalltalk ;-).  I suppose you could if
> you were required to give an empty arglist like [|| ...] when
> there weren't any arguments so there would be no confusion with
> an Array literal.  But if you were going to change the language
> why not only allow one of the two currently allowed syntaxes for
> a block ({|| ...}, or do || ... end), and use the other to
> instantiate an actual Proc object (and I'm not necessarily
> advocating this, but it might add more visual distinction).  The
> best I can offer you is a band-aid, lambda instead of proc (a
> much nicer word don't you think?).
>
> Alexander Schofield
>
> Michael Lucas-Smith wrote:
> > I see what you're saying. I suggest that perhaps it was a
> > mistake to re-use the same syntax between hash and block.
> > Obviously that cannot be fixed now, but perhaps [] can be used
> > to represent a proc so that:
> >
> > proc { ... }
> > and:
> > [ ... ]
> >
> > mean the same thing.
> >
> > Michael
Possibly a new reserved word:  procs
The meaning would be that all of the remaining arguments were 
procs. Thus:
def method (procs a, b, c)

This would be in error if, e.g., c were not a proc, and one could 
also have
def method (some, bunch, of, arguments, procs a, b, c)

There is a question in my mind as to whether or not one should be 
able to specify an indefinite number of procedure arguments, but I 
don't see how one could have both multiple procedure agruments and 
an indefinite number of non-procedural arguments.  I don't see why 
one would want to, but perhaps one should plan for the necessity.  
In that case the syntax would change to:
def method (some, arguments) procs (a, b, c)

This could get messy if one were using in-line code rather than 
procedure variables, but that's more the fault of the in-line code 
than anything else.

-- 
 Charles Hixson
 
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