From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-10-11T12:30:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Why does a lot of code not include parenthesis?

On Sunday, October 10, 2010 07:25:15 pm egervari wrote:
> I just started playing around with ruby and rails, and one thing I've
> noticed is that the style of the code is a little odd. People don't
> use parenthesis most or even all of the time.

Right.

> I find this to look messy.

I find redundant crap looks messy. Without parentheses, it can often read like 
English, and it's very easy to build remarkable DSLs.

> It's hard to tell what is the method, what
> is the variable, and how the code is formed at a glance.

I don't agree, but maybe I've been looking at it for too long. Maybe it just 
takes practice. However, I think it's much more important whether I can tell 
what a piece of code is trying to do -- it may be slightly more difficult, but 
I can always figure out how it works.

> Is there any reason tastes in style have changed? I think it would be
> best to stick with the parenthesis just to make everything consistent.

With what?

I am consistent. I don't use parentheses unless I have to. This is true even 
in languages where parentheses are required for method calls. Consider:

distance = Math.sqrt(x*x + y*y)

Yes, I had to write parens around the body of the square root to make it 
unambiguous. Were this Java, I would also be required to because Math.sqrt is 
a method call. But I didn't do this, though I could have:

distance = (Math.sqrt((x*x) + (y*y)))

I don't know about you, but I find that a lot less readable.

I'm also consistent with the majority of the Ruby community, so about all 
adding parens would help with is being consistent with other programming 
languages -- but I think we should celebrate Ruby's strengths, not try to 
bring it down to the lowest common denominator.

I'm also consistent with how you run commands. After all, you don't do this:

'gem' 'install' 'rails'

...do you? Single-quotes would be unambiguous, and it would make your commands 
more consistent with the times when you actually need them to escape special 
characters, like spaces:

rm 'My Essay.odt'

But even though it's only a few extra keystrokes, I think most of us would 
find the extra noise to be _less_ readable, not more. Quoting, in this case, 
is a tool to remove ambiguity, nothing more -- and I would argue parens serve 
the same purpose in most languages, and should not be required when the 
meaning is unambiguous.

Same with semicolons. You can put them at every line, but Ruby is smart enough 
to figure out what you mean most of the time, so instead, you only need to use 
semicolons (or a backslash at the end of a line) as an exception to the rule, 
as a tool to remove ambiguity.

> It should be easier to refactor code and inline things if the
> parenthesis were already there after all.

How so?