From: Kevin <darkintent@...>
Date: 2012-02-09T05:55:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Using _ like in Scala?

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Steve Klabnik <steve@steveklabnik.com> wrote:
> Ruby has Perl's $_, but only in certain contexts:
>
> $ echo "foo" |  ruby -pe 'next unless $_ =~ /(foo|bar|baz)/'
> foo
> $
>
> For example. I'm not sure when it's valid, as this perl-ism isn't:
>
> 1.9.2p290 :001 > fruits = %w( apple banana orange )
>  => ["apple", "banana", "orange"]
> 1.9.2p290 :002 > fruits.each { puts $_ }
>
>
>
>  => ["apple", "banana", "orange"]
>

Wouldn't the general use case at issue here be addressed by adding
standalone versions of various functions traditionally associated with
collections so that one could call say reduce like "reduce myarray,
:+"?  Granted if we started doing that we might get tempted to
parenthesize everything and at that point we may as well go write
Lisp.