From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2009-05-14T22:36:26+09:00
Subject: Re: [bikeshed] Syntactic sugar idea

Daniel DeLorme wrote:
> It seems that often an object will be passed into a block only to invoke
> a method of that object:
>   arr.map{ |obj| obj.some_method }
> 
> So I had the (weird? stupid?) thought that it would be nice to have some
> syntactic sugar like this:
>   arr.map{ .some_method }
> 
> Does that make any sense?

Groovy has this in the form of the "it" magic variable:

[1,2,3].each {puts it}

While I absolutely hate the moniker "it" the idea itself has grown on 
me. Perhaps something more scala-like:

[1,2,3].each {puts _}

Or a pseudo-global:

[1,2,3].each {puts $it}

I hacked "it" to work in JRuby once recently, and it's not difficult.

- Charlie