From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-09-27T08:25:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby - common pitfalls?

Hi,

In message "Ruby - common pitfalls?"
    on 02/09/27, Rudolf Polzer <AntiATField_adsgohere@durchnull.de> writes:

|- the if syntax. Pascal-style if is supported (and one is tempted to use
|  it instead of the also supported C-style if since parantheses aren't
|  easy to enter on most keyboards), but comparisons have to be written
|  in C style. Therefore this happened to me more than once:
|
|    if foo = nil then
|      # ...
|    end
|
|  It's getting even worse because nil is named 'nil', like it is in
|  Pascal.

Hmm, if you are Pascal addicted, you have to write

  if foo = nil then
  begin
    # ...
  end

and should get syntax error. ;-)
It might be dangerous for Modula-2 users.

|- accessing one character in a string.
|
|  s[3] does not do what most programmers would expect:

May change in the future, due to M17N support.

|- a %= b versus %=...=. A syntax highlighter gets into big trouble when
|  seeing this construct. Nothing really seriuos, but I already had to
|  insert "useless" comments to fix vim's highlighting - which is unable
|  to correctly highlight if-then-end expressions. Perhaps it would help
|  to deprecate %=...= as string separator (any other character could be
|  used with less problems).

I admit Ruby syntax highlighter must be very smart.

|  *a = *b + *c
|
|would be possible?

No way, I like the following

|Or perhaps instead:
|
|  a.zipWith! (b) do |x, y| x + y end # slightly resembling Haskell
|  a = b.zipWith (c) do |x, y| x + y end
|
|which is a bit more verbose, but can be done with the current syntax.

iff it has a better name than zipWith.

							matz.