From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2002-09-11T01:10:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 12:37:12AM +0900, dblack@candle.superlink.net wrote:
> Hi --
> 
> On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:
> 
> > Agreed.  Until now, I still mistakenly use the "." operator from time to
> > time in Ruby, just because of the previous Perl experience, which was
> > very natural.
> 
> But then what would Ruby use for method calls on strings?  Honestly, I
> don't think this can be cited as an example of an incorrect choice in
> Ruby.

Ruby could use a different operator, which is what I've read that perl6
will do, since it is also going to be using "." for method calls.

I think "+" is more natural to me for concatenation than "*" or "/", and
I would expect that even a Perl programmer would agree.  As for "+" vs.
"." or "_" or "~", I feel at home with "+" because of my experience with
BASIC.  The fact that it has an overloaded meaning doesn't bother me,
since I'm used to having symbols with overloaded meaning in mathematics
(sigma, for example, can indicate standard deviation or 2-D density; it
just depends on the context).

Paul