From: Michael Sullivan <mps@...>
Date: 2002-04-23T05:44:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby as Smalltalk


Not to start a flame war, and a "my language is better than your
language" debate.  Somehow this all reminds me of people writing C
macros to program C as though they were programming in Pascal.

I forget where I heard the quote:

"If you want to code in C, code in C.  If you want to code in Pascal
code in Pascal. But, don't make you C look like Pascal and your Pascal
look like C."

I'm sure if one tried enough one could make Ruby look like COBOL (or
Java), but why?  :)

Mike

#define begin {
#define end   }

#define true  1
#define false 0



On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 05:12:10AM +0900, Paul Brannan wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 12:19:43AM +0900, Nat Pryce wrote:
> > 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
> 
> This seems very awkward to me, much more so than passing two procs to a
> single method.  I didn't even realize this syntax was legal.
> 
> > While in Smalltalk it would be:
> > 
> > some_test ifTrue: [
> >     something.
> > ]
> > ifFalse: [
> >     something_else.
> > ].
> 
> If syntax is what you are after, consider this (just for fun; I don't
> know if this is reasonable for production code):
> 
> It seems to me that this would be much slower than the standard
> if/then/else/end, since so many method calls are involved.  In
> Smalltalk, it looks like only one method call, but it still looks like a
> method call.  How does Smalltalk make its ifTrue:/iFalse: work at a
> reasonable speed?
> 
> Paul
> 

-- 
Michael P. Sullivan                                  
Distributed Computing Systems, LLC                         Cell: 516-429-2080 
E-Mail: mps@discomsys.com                           http://www.discomsys.com/ 
    * UNIX Systems and Database Consulting, Architecture and Management *
"Failing to plan, is planning to fail... plan for the worst, hope for the best"