From: ddet@... (Det) Date: 2002-09-10T18:33:50+09:00 Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby Denys Usynin wrote in message news:... > 5. Forgiving syntax leaves lots of room to fool yourself. Classical > example: x = y +z > It is VERY counter-intuitive to me that this tries to call method y with > paramter +z instead of adding the two numbers together Why, having the basic concept of unary operators ... having the basic concept of leaving parentheses when calling functions ... how can the interpreter decide what you *meant*? To me it was good to see that Ruby works in some (many) parts like other languages I know. I felt familiar very soon. (Well, did not know more than rudimentary Lisp I learned more about the functional way using Python and was able to adapt it to my view of some Java codes. Understanding that concept I easily learned the code block concept (would be hard otherwise). Using a special sign prefix for variables ($,@) normally annoyes me, but not too much, as I'm used to Unix, awk, a bit of Perl ... and so on). On the other hand I did never _expect_ Ruby to work in any cases exactly like the other languages I know (if it would I had no reason to switch :-) ). Instead I enjoyed learning knew concepts I did not work with before (like the extensive use of iterators in combination with code blocks as a programming style (I did not know Smalltalk) ). So again: Least surprise does not mean no surprise to everyone KR Dirk Detering -aka Det