[ruby-talk:04356] Re: DATA and rewind.

Hi,

Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, ts wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "H" == Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <[e-mail]> writes:
> >
> > H> The Principle of Least Surprise would suggest this is not a feature.  Or
> > H> is it?   I can see what is happening, I'm not really sure that it should.
> >
> >  perl do the same thing, you can write :
> 
> OK, principle of "least surprise for Perlists" is a good idea. I have not
> tested this (recently enough to remember) in Perl or Python.

Well, to reassure the rabid Perl-haters lurking in the shadows, even I
wouldn't go quite that far, even for the sake of making Ruby more
convert-friendly. I think in this case it's more the principle of least
surprise for the feature. AFAIK this feature was (loosely speaking)
copied from Perl some time ago, and the Perl developers are continually
trying to usefully (i.e. in a tacitly least surprise manner) generalize
features, so it's often worth looking at what they did or didn't do, and
for what reasons. While the _syntax_ of such things tends to  be
Perl-encumbered, the _behavior_ of such things often transcends Perl, so
it's often worthwhile to see how Perl behaves. And likewise for Python. 

-- 
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)