[ruby-talk:04361] Re: DATA and rewind.

I'll agree with that. It's good to copy useful language features,
and not just for making converts.

But it's good to smooth out any bumos that we can. If there's
no good reason for an idiosyncrasy, I say let it go.

Hal


----- Original Message -----
From: Conrad Schneiker <[e-mail]>
To: ruby-talk ML <[e-mail]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2000 11:48 AM
Subject: [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.)
>