From: dblack@...
Date: 2002-09-11T00:12:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Hello --

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 David.Stagner@mpls.frb.org wrote:

> I think Gavin is right... we don't "add" strings, we concatenate them.
> Using the + operator to mean "concatenate" violates our eighth grade
> algebra sensibilities.  It's, um, surprising.

I have to ask... how much surprise or learning curve is *really*
involved in finding out that a language uses '+' to concatenate
strings?  I don't mean to sound gruff -- I'm just surprised (!) by
what seems to be the extreme fine-tunedness of people's expectations.
Eighth grade seems like a long time ago... (and probably was longer
for me than for most people here :-)  Was everything so rigidly set so
long ago, that the slightest expansion or reinterpretation really
causes problems?

> Note that the often-awkward Perl uses . as a string concatenation
> operator, not +.  This is one of the things Perl got right and Ruby got
> wrong, imho.

You can't blame Ruby, though -- after all, '.' is already doing quite
a lot :-)


David

-- 
David Alan Black                      | Register for RubyConf 2002!
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