From: Reimer Behrends <behrends@...>
Date: 2002-09-07T06:20:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Andrew Hunt (andy@toolshed.com) wrote:
[...]
>  But you've piqued my curiosity: tell me, what did you find
>  surprising about Ruby?  Where "surprising" is defined as 
>  "you thought it worked one way" and then discovered that it did not,
>  or that it worked that way some of the time and some other way
>  the rest of the time?

There are a few things. One is operator precedence; to find out that

	a = not(b)

does not work at all, and only gives you an unclear error message is
a real puzzler. Another one is

	statement while condition

Noting that the condition is tested before the statement is executed
seems to be contrary to how every other language with test-at-end
loops does it. To discover then that

	begin statement end while condition

works the other way round is even more confusing.

		Reimer Behrends