From: dblack@...
Date: 2002-09-07T06:58:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Hi --

On Sat, 7 Sep 2002, Reimer Behrends wrote:

> 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.

And if you add a rescue:

  begin statement; rescue; end while condition

it once again tests the condition first, which I've always found kind
of anomalous....  It means you can't casually throw in a rescue clause
for debugging purposes, or whatever, because the logic will change.


David

-- 
David Alan Black                      | Register for RubyConf 2002!
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