From: Justin Johnson <justinj@...>
Date: 2002-07-18T19:09:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Syntax "surprise"

> 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 ;-)

A few postings elsewhere have given examples of getting something that's
similar to Objective-C's (and SmallTalks)  message syntax.  Like a few other
people here, I think that naming message parameters can improve readability.
I wonder if it would at all be worth considering a little syntactic sugar
for this?

obj.my_method( :x => 10, :y => 20, :z => 30 )

sweetened to:

obj.my_method( x: 10, y: 20, z: 30 )

where the ':' at the end of a parameter var really treats the var name as a
symbol and behaves as though it's followed by a '=>'.

Look neat to me.  What does anybody else think?

I think the blocks use {} because they are more familiar to many
programmers.  After first looking at SmallTalk, I found the [] for blocks
strange until I got used to it. [] are used often for indexing in lots of
other languages.

Hey, wait a minute....are you trying to turn Ruby into SmallTalk? :o)

--
Justin Johnson