From: Mike Stok <mike@...>
Date: 2002-09-11T01:34:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

In article <20020910121025.E20993@atdesk.com>, Paul Brannan wrote:

>> 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).

Perl might not have used . for string concatenation were it not for the
number/string morphing nature of perl scalars.

In Ruby a variable's type tells us what it is, in Perl the operators
provide context as to what a scalar ought to be viewed as, and this
is why they need an "extra" set of comparison operators e.g.

  # perl

  $a = '123 ';
  $b = 45;

  # $a + $b  => 168
  # $a . $b  => '123 45'

  # $a > $b  => 1
  # $a gt $b => a false value

I prefer the explicitness of ruby (requiring .to_?), and its overloading
of + isn't too surprising e.g.

  2 + 2           => 4
  "123 " + "45"   => "123 45"
  [1,2,3] + [4,5] => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Mike

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