From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T07:51:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christoph" <chr_news@gmx.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2002 2:02 PM
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby


> "Gavin Sinclair" wrote
> ....
> > > For example, we only have "everything's an object" behavior
> > > for some math intrinsics and the interface for files is a bit
> > > strange, e.g., I expected 5.cos or aFile.rename('toThisName'),
> > > not Math.cos(5) and File.rename(aFile,'toThisName').
> >
> > 5.cos, 5.arcsin, 5.tenthroot, 5.inverse, 5.negative, 5.prime?
> >
> > It has to stop somewhere.
>
> Why? - once I get used to {}.inverse, 5.abs or 5.0.finite? I find
> zero, zip, nil reasons for expecting why 5.0.inverse, 5.0.sin or
> 5.prime? would work differently?
>
> >
> > The methods you can call on numbers are intended, IMO, to represent the
things
> > that numbers have in common.  Operations like cos() make sense as pure
> > functions.

My take on this is that we do things like sin(x)
rather than x.sin out of sheer mathematical habit,
not based on any compelling logic.

Hal