From: Jo Totland <jo@...>
Date: 2000-07-13T12:23:29+02:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:03964] Re: Array.uniq! returning nil

[ Yukihiro Matsumoto ]

> Like bang sign for Scheme language, right?
> 
> In Scheme, every destructive operation has bang sign at the end of the
> name.  Ruby did not follow this principle, rather I choose to put bang
> sign at the end of the name of methods which are more dangerous than
> alternative.  You know I mean?  Every bang method has non-bang
> (i.e. safer) counterpart.  You can totally forget about bang methods
> at first.
> 
> 							matz.

Hi, I haven't programmed much in Ruby yet, but what I've seen so far
seems right. I've been looking for something that could be my
favourite scripting language, and just wasn't satisfied with Python or
Perl. Ruby seems to have the best features (and more so) of them
both...

But I don't understand your decision to _not_ follow Scheme tradition
here? After all it's understandable, and it's easy to remember. While
it's certainly possible to overdo cleanness, I don't think this is
where you should start worrying. The point made about concat earlier
in this thread is a valid critiscism.

I havent' really read up on ruby's regexps yet either, but here Perl
has a very nice rule: everything that's a normal letter or digit is
special iff prefixed with a backslash, and everything else is special
iff not prefixed with a backslash. This is a really neat rule, and
even if the rest of regexps in Perl is a mess (as is all regexps) and
totally nonunderstandable, it's sort of nice to have some basic rule
to grab hold of. So if ruby's regexps doesn't already follow such a
convention (from what I've managed to read so far, they don't), it's
something I for one would love to see... :-)

 -Jo
-- 
Don't think of yourself as the least intelligent creature in this room...
If you consider the entire planet you're smarter than literally hundreds of
people. (Dogbert)