From: Mike Hall <mghall@...>
Date: 2002-07-24T00:46:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Syntax "surprise"

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> In message "Re: Syntax "surprise""
>     on 02/07/18, Brad Cox <bcox@virtualschool.edu> writes:
> 
> |Its not a language's business to prevent users from writing "smelly" code.
> 
> Despite I agree with this principle most of the cases, I'm not sure
> whether allowing trailing comma in argument list enhance / reduce
> astonishment, considering most of popular languages (except Perl) does
> not allow trailing comma.

I agree that trailing commas are strange.  A comma means something,
to the language and to people who read a script in that language.
A trailing comma means something is missing.

If I could raise a similar issue,
I noticed this in the 1.6.7 TODO file:

  - compile time string concatenation, "hello" "world" => "helloworld"
 
I know that some other popular languages like to do that,
but I think it would be better to leave it as two arguments.
After all, someone wrote those two literals separately on purpose.

I would even go so far as to make commas optional, if that is possible.
(other popular languages use white-space delimiters: sh, Tcl, Lisp)
There would be less symbol clutter,  and the script might be easier 
to read.
 
	obj.method a, b, c {|i| xyz}
  vs
	obj.method a b c {|i| xyz}
 

	obj.method "a", "b", "c"
  vs
 	obj.method "a" "b" "c"

Just something that would make Ruby even better, I think.

--
Mike Hall
http://www.enteract.com/~mghall