From: Drew Mills <tamills@...>
Date: 2002-09-11T05:02:14+09:00
Subject: RE: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

And I feel the need to weigh in here, too.  Not everyone is surprised by
overloading.  Context pretty often resolves overloads easily, even in the
mind  of humans reading code.

For instance, when you read the the above paragraph did you see red?  And if
you read the next paragraph, your head will head you in the right direction
(or left, or correct).  If I lead you down the wrong path, you have been
lead, unless you use lead to protect you from the radiowaves I'm using as a
mind-control device.  And did you notice I used two 'the's in the first
paragraph of this sentence?  Probably one too many.

Hopefully, our code doesn't look this bad, but my point is that we deal in
ambiguity regularly.  We resolve both symbols and sounds contextually and
are quite adept at it.  We do so because it is easier to re-use a symbol,
resolving ambiguities as we go, than to create and burn in a new
symbol/semantic combo.

Drew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dblack@candle.superlink.net [mailto:dblack@candle.superlink.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2002 11:12 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> 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!
> home: dblack@candle.superlink.net     | November 1-3
> work: blackdav@shu.edu                | Seattle, WA, USA
> Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav | http://www.rubyconf.com
>