From: Overnight <NOSPAM_jazz_x@..._NOSPAM>
Date: 2002-09-13T06:41:06+09:00
Subject: Re: New newbies Qs on Ruby

In article <1031822816.581.1224.camel@silver>, transami@transami.net 
says...
> On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 02:59, Overnight wrote:
> > So... is there another "right" way to get what I want?
> your third is right. you can use def self.m1 instead from what i
> understand, though i never do. and self will pick up the module at that
> level. that's how it works ruby allows you to define module/class
> methods by prefixing the module/class name and a period. honest
> question, how would you want it to work?

Well, any way will do, as long as I have a clear grasp of what's going on 
and of the rationale behind some design choices :-) I'm exploring Ruby 
and in this phase I'm really open-minded, as long as I have an 
understanding of the language's workings and idioms.

It is a fact, however, that my past experiences with Perl, Python and 
Visual Basic, have had some (bad?) influence on my personal definition of 
what a Module is. 

Influenced by such languages which tend to give to 'module' the meaning 
of "container of functions", I was tempted to write:

module M
private
	def m2
		puts "In m2"
	end
	def m1
		m2
	end
public
	def m
		m1
	end
end
M.m

i.e., I was tempted to avoid the 'M.*' syntax, except when absolutely 
needed (to specify the namespace in which m() is defined, in this case). 
But... this is just too Perlish or Pythonesque, I'm afraid... I must 
upgrade my mind to an OO view :-)

(warning: what follow is my personal opinion, no flame intended :-) )

I really like Ruby. Last summer I downloaded Squeak and so I 
(re)discovered the beauty of Smalltalk, which I had not used for more 
than 10 years (while I was graduating). I was using Python for sysadm and 
text processing tasks, and comparing it with Smalltalk convinced me that 
it (Python) was too much of a kludge for my personal taste. Not to talk 
about the new features introduced by Python 2.2, definitely too 
bizantine for me. Someone on comp.lang.pyhton mentioned Ruby, I 
downloaded it and... it was what I wanted, kind-of Smalltalk without the 
Smalltalk environment, usable both for scripting and quick and dirty one-
liners and for larger projects. 

Probably because I'm graduated in Computer Science, I tend to consider 
every language as a work of art, and before using it for something 
"useful" I spend some/a lot of time to understand it and its design 
choices. Under this particular point of view, I find Ruby to be quite 
"beautiful", and I'll drop Python for it.

There are some things I don't like, but compared with what I don't like 
in other languages they are not so important. To be honest, I'm not sure 
that the freedom in syntax allowed by Ruby promotes readability. If a 
line of code is:

funcname a

how do you now if you must read it as:

funcname(a) (where a is a variable)

or

funcname(self.a())

Also I don't like things that can be written in different manners, 
because I think these ambiguities make code less readable. For example a 
block may be delimited by 'do...end' or by '{...}': I personally prefer 
'{...}', but when I read code written by others I must remember to also 
look for 'do...end'... 

And I still don't understand why (see my previous posts):

- aModule.constants behaves differently from aClass.constants (but there 
is a very pragmatic answer here: aClass.constants-
aClass.superclass.constants will work, while aModule.constants-
aModule.superclass.constants won't)

- module Kernel defines as singleton methods (almost) all of his private 
instance methods

But this are minor things, and all in all I like what I've seen so far :-
)

Thank you for your answer, and excuse me for a lengthy reply :-)

Andrea