From: Christoph <chr_news@...>
Date: 2002-06-13T04:02:40+09:00
Subject: Re: a new block parameter/variable notation (Re: ruby-dev summary 17252-17356)

"Tobias Reif" <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> wrote in
....
> > And *I was wrong*.  This rule is the single biggest design flaw in
> > Ruby.
>
>
> Perhaps Rite / Ruby 2+ is a chance to fix this and similiar issues?
>
> I think sometimes, non-backwards-compatible changes are OK, if done in a
> transparent way.
> People can continue to use Ruby 2- programs with 2- interpreter
> versions, and update to 2+ versions as soon as the need arises, by
> making some changes to the existing programs.

Maybe it is actually possible to mix new and old behavior within
a single interpreter even in the 1.7 - 1.8 series  reminiscent to
the ``from  __future__ import'' mechanism in the Python world,
where they seem to have a lot of experience in overcoming single
biggest design flaws;-).  Irony aside, Python actually seem to be
rather successful in introducing incompatible language changes.

A probably brain dead idea coming to my mind is changing the
value of a  (or more then one?) global variable(s) appropriately.
For example, before and after importing (requiring) a library,
you would to set

 $behavior  =  'future'
  require 'new_fancy_lib'
  # back to the old way
 $behavior = `backward'  # 'redneck'  you name it ...


/Christoph