From: Nat Pryce <nat.pryce@...13media.com>
Date: 2002-04-23T00:19:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby as Smalltalk

From: ";" <bbense+comp.lang.ruby.Apr.22.02@telemark.stanford.edu>
> In article <001c01c1e8d4$0290f650$0100a8c0@backpack>,
> - - This seems to be the main critism of ex-smalltalkers when they
>   first look at Ruby. However, you can implement all those hoopy
>   control abstractions in Ruby, you just have to use Procs rather
>   than blocks. You can pass an arbitrary number of Procs to a
>   method.

Sure, but the syntax is awkward.  That's the beauty of Smalltalk -- user
defined control abstractions use the same syntactic style as the existing
set of control structures.  Programming then becomes a matter of defining
and using domain specific languages built from the primitives provided by
the Smalltalk environment.  The same is true in Lisp, but Smalltalk's syntax
is more readable, in my opinion.

E.g. in Ruby a user defined control structure if-then-else block would look
like this, which is more awkward than the built in if statement:

if some_test proc do
    something
end, else proc do
    something_else
end

While in Smalltalk it would be:

some_test ifTrue: [
    something.
]
ifFalse: [
    something_else.
].

Which is, in fact, the built in if statement, because all control structures
in Smalltalk are defined in terms of the object model rather than being
special syntax.

Cheers,
            Nat.