From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-10T02:11:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

Dave Thomas wrote:
> William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@z.glue.umd.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>>I still feel that we are better off without alternatives in a
>>computer language.  To draw an analogy, C is logically very simple,
>>it has only four (main) components: array, structure, function, and
>>pointer.  But from this minimal components, we can write almost any
>>imaginable code (including Ruby itself).
> 
> 
> 
> But C has while loops and for loops. It doesn't need these, given an
> if statement and goto.
> 
> It also has all those redundant comparison operators. Why have both
> <=, >, and >= when all you need is < and =?
> 
> And of course it has all those redundant bit operators: all you need
> is & and ~.
> 
> And so on...
> 
> 
> 
> Dave
> 

I had the "luck" to work with a C-purist together on a project. He
insisted to use only "*" for pointer dereferencing, but no ->, because
it was redundant. The problem is, that this added so much parenthesis to his
code, that reading it was not much fun.

( OTOH (as a purist) he omitted parenthesis if it was not needed because
of the precedence rules. That was not fun reading either... :( )

Regards, Christian