From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-07-31T01:27:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Language Q's

Hi,

In message "Ruby Language Q's"
    on 02/07/30, "Justin Johnson" <justinj@mobiusent.com> writes:

|After several rewrites of my GC memory code and implementing most of the
|code for Ruby runtime, I'm now posed with the issues of parsing and language
|specification.  All the class/module/object/methods/vars code is in place.
|It's cool to see the arms and legs working...now to put the heart in place!

Good to hear that!

|Matz - I've enjoyed trawling through 7 years of history in the form of your
|original Ruby C code!

Actually more than 9 years.  Someone got to rewrite the code.
I'm not sure yet it is going to be yours.  But it is a good news
anyway.

|1. Ruby comes with a hell of a lot of features built-in, like the Perl $
|variables and so on.  Shouldn't all this perhaps be classed as an extension?
|I kind of like the idea of a very clean and elegant language out of the box.

Interesting idea.

|2. I like the idea of named method parameters (ala Smalltalk, Objective-C).
|There was a discussion elsewhere showing something similar using hash
|tables.  With a bit of syntactic sugar...   :var => 10 could be  var: 10

I want something more, for example:

  class PC
    def initialize(cpu:, os: "Windows", **info)
      @cpu = cpu        # "cpu" is a mandatory named arg
      @os = os          # "os" is with the default value
      @info = info      # symbol=>value hashtable
    end
  end
  PC.new(os: "Linux", cpu: "P-III", clock: "600MHz", hdd: "30G")

							matz.