From: Brad Cox <bcox@...>
Date: 2002-07-18T08:47:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Syntax "surprise"

At 7:48 AM +0900 7/18/02, Avi Bryant wrote:
>Ruby with Objective-C's message syntax?  Now that's something I could
>really get behind... we could change the block syntax from {} to []
>while we're at it, get rid of control structures in favor of methods
>like ifTrue:ifFalse:, build a class browser or two, and we'd have a
>great little language ;-)

While we're picking syntactic nits, how about replacing begin...end with
{...} throughout? I rely on vim parentheses matching heavily and 
begin--end removes this indispensible cruth.

>Seriously, though, I'm curious - how did you end up at Ruby instead
>of, say, Squeak?  Clearly not for syntax reasons.  I enjoy developing
>in Ruby, Smalltalk, and Objective-C about equally (they all share the
>One True Object Model, after all), but I sure do miss keyword
>selectors in Ruby...

I wouldn't say I've "ended up" with any particular tool, any more 
than a carpenter "ends up" with a particular saw. I keep lots of 
tools around and choose the right one for the job.

See http://virtualschool.edu/ile/tut/Pages/Background/HistoryPage for 
why I picked ruby for the interactive learning environment project. 
The biggest single reason was its #{...} string escape sequence, 
which was unobtrusive and understandable even to nonprogrammers. 
Mainly dropped python for this very reason. See 
http://virtualschool.edujwaa/demo/JwaaMLS for the nonsense I had to 
go through to do something similar in java.

Please pardon the typos; they are fixed in the next release.
-- 
Brad Cox, PhD; bcox@virtualschool.edu 703 361 4751
o For industrial age goods there were checks and credit cards.
    For everything else there is http://virtualschool.edu/mybank
o Interactive Learning Environment http://virtualschool.edu/ile
o Java Web Application Architecture: http://virtualschool.edu/jwaa