From: Peter Hickman <peterhickman386@...>
Date: 2010-07-07T18:36:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Hashes don't allow preceding commas by design?

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On 7 July 2010 10:15, Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think that I feel this should not be the case, because I feel that the
> interpreter should not consider any of it complete since it is inside of an
> incomplete hash.
>
> However, these examples have me so unsure of what is supposed to be what
> that I can't construct a response illustrating this. Please double check
> these examples.
>

The structure of a has assignment could be either:

1: => a = { :fred => 42 }

or

1: => a =
2: => {
3: => :fred => 42
4: => }

Here line 1 is incomplete so it treats line 2 as a continuation. Line 2 says
'here is the start of a hash' and is also incomplete. So line 3 is seen as a
continuation of line 2.
Line 3 is complete in that it is a valid statement that can be found inside
a hash declaration but the parser is still looking for the closing } to
match the opening { from line 2. So although line 3 is a complete valid
statement it is part of lines 1 and 2 which is an incomplete hash
declaration.

So line 4 is taken to be a continuation of lines 1, 2 and 3 and finally
completes the statement that started on line 1.

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