From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2010-07-11T01:04:29+09:00
Subject: Re: what about allowing to specify, which end belongs to which start?

Jan Lelis wrote:
> Hi Ruby mailing list,
> 
> I've recently come across a pretty common situation in Ruby:
> 
>        end
>      end
>    end
> 
> After those parts, you often don't know, where exactly you have to
> continue.

You can always use comments, although I'd only usually do this for 
nested modules. e.g.

module Foo
module Bar
  class Baz
    ....
  end # class Baz
end # module Bar
end # module Foo

Otherwise, I've never found it a problem, unless I've missed an 'end', 
or forgotten a 'do'.

ruby 1.9 with -w flag has a neat feature where it will warn if the 
indentation is not as expected, thus making it much easier to find where 
the problem is.

e.g.

$ cat test.rb
def foo
  puts "hello"
  5.times           # note missing "do"
    puts "world"
  end
  puts "goodbye"
end
$ ruby19 test.rb
test.rb:7: syntax error, unexpected keyword_end, expecting $end
$ ruby19 -w test.rb
test.rb:5: warning: mismatched indentations at 'end' with 'def' at 1
test.rb:7: syntax error, unexpected keyword_end, expecting $end

This shows that the 'end' at line 5 was associated with the 'def' at 
line 1, which helps localise the problem.

It's a shame that ruby 1.8.7 doesn't have this feature, although you can 
keep a copy of ruby 1.9 lying around just for locating such problems 
(the parsing of the two languages is very similar, even though the 
semantics are very different)
-- 
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