From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2002-09-27T22:55:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby - common pitfalls?


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rudolf Polzer" <AntiATField_adsgohere@durchnull.de>
> > >
> > > Maybe it's less tempting to write a Pascal-style equality test if the if
> > > syntax does not look exactly like Pascal.
> >
> > Instead of finding "workarounds" to make Ruby look like Pascal or Bash, why
not
> > just learn Ruby properly?  Use -w always.
>
> -w tells you the error *after* you have done it. It would be better it it
> would not happen at all.

That's pretty common where languages, interpreters and warning are concerned :)

> And sometimes such code is written on purpose:
>
> if retval = foo
>   # use retval
> end
>
> creates a warning.
>
> if retval = foo ()
>   # ...
> end
>
> creates another one ("foo (...) interpreted as method call"). What else
> could it be? To me it just looks better when there's a space between the
> method name and the opening brace. I know it is interpreted as method
> call then and not as first argument. Is there a way to disable this
> single warning?

I doubt it.

> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > > - a %= b versus %=...=. A syntax highlighter gets into big trouble
[...]
> >
> > So use another character.
>
> *I* use another character. But when I use %= to get the modulus (a %=
> 3), vim's highlighting fails and I have to write a comment (#=) to make
> vim highlight the rest of the code correctly.
>
> I don't want to always write
>
>   a = a % 3
>
> just to make it easier to vim.
>

Fair enough.  Sorry, I misunderstood the problem.  Have you informed the syntax
maintainer for ruby/vim?

Aside: in all my years of programming, I've used % rarely and %= extremely
rarely.  When I did use %= (in C++ I think), I actually expanded it because %=
wasn't a common enough idiom in my experience, so a = a % 3 made more sense.

Gavin