From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-06-12T15:01:17+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby-dev summary 17252-17356

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James F.Hranicky" <jfh@cise.ufl.edu>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: ruby-dev summary 17252-17356


> Should we perhaps take a vote and see how many folks have ruby
> programs that depend on block parameters referencing outer variables?
> I've always treated block variables as block local -- perhaps breaking
> backwards compatibility won't have such a huge impact.

I don't think I agree.

Bear in mind that these don't have to be 
simple variables. Because multiple assignment 
is used, they can be any "assignable" entity,
even a "setter" (method=) for an object.

Someone once posted an example like:

1.upto(100) {|scrollbar.value| sleep 0.1 }

Kind of neat, and I'd hate to break this kind
of orthoganality.

Devil's advocate: On the other hand, we aren't
actually talking about removing functionality,
just changing syntax... and it's the sort of
thing that we could generate a warning for, or
even create a tool to find the cases and update
them.


Hal Fulton