From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-09-04T04:31:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

> What finally turned me off was that in Python the object is modeled rather
> crudely using a hash (in Ruby also, but not as naked as in Python).  For
> example, to access the object instance variable, the object method is
> defined as
> 
>     def f1 (self, x1, x2, ....)
>         self.x1 = x1
>     ....
> 
> This shows how crude the object model is in Python.  (Well, in Ruby we
> don't see this until we code Ruby in C :) .)

Hmm, I think that at the lowest level (whether C extension or guts of
the interpreter or assembly language) you would *have* to see this --
it can't be hidden at that level. A method has to know what the value
of 'self' is ultimately.
 
> Regarding whether Matz knew Python or not before he wrote Ruby, let's ask
> Matz...

Well, I broke down and did a little web search. Apparently 
Python dates back to 1991, making it at least two years older 
than Ruby. I didn't know that.

I knew I had *heard* of Python (1996?) before I *heard* of 
Ruby (1999) but they both were in existence before that, of
course.

Hal