From: billtj@... (Bill Tj) Date: 2002-10-09T21:31:37+09:00 Subject: Any Pascal's Influence on Ruby? Hi, It seems so far that Ruby is usually attributed as taking the best features of several other languages, but Pascal is not one of them. To me, coming from the Basic->Fortran->C/C++->Java->Tcl->Perl->Python background, the first time I saw Ruby, I said, "it looks like Pascal", because of the "end" keywords, and "begin" and "do" (although they are used differently in Ruby). Now, with the proposed ":=" block operator, I think then Ruby really looks like Pascal. Probably some other languages have syntax similar to Pascal, but at least to me Pascal is the "major" language that is closest to Ruby in syntax resemblance. ("Major" because at least some time ago the first language taught in CS is Pascal; remember how Borland's Turbo Pascal got its popularity?) So can anyone say about Pascal's influence on Ruby? Maybe yes, not at all, or a little bit? In addition, with ":=" as a new operator, is there any case where it will be confused with "the symbol of '='"? (Does it look like that in Ruby, the punctuations begin to have too many different, unrelated meanings, just as the "static" keyword in C++?) Regards, Bill =============================================================================== Mauricio Fern�ndez wrote in message news:<20021008163621.GE10843@student.ei.uni-stuttgart.de>... > This might sound wildly un-scientific, but I very much prefer matz's > cautious approach, where features are added carefully and bad style > (such as the example you give) is discouraged by the language, to keeping adding > feature after feature to Ruby until it becomes "interpreted Smalltalk + Perl > + CLU + Algol + Lisp + C++ + ??"