From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2002-10-12T04:11:32+09:00
Subject: Re: syntax string[0]=?t


From: "Kontra, Gergely" <kgergely@mlabdial.hit.bme.hu>


> Hi!
>
> Is there any good idea how should a character represented in ruby? The
> current one looks weird an is not intuitive, and more and more such
> things are inserted into ruby (@@var as a class variable eg.) , so it
> begins to look like a perl program (and one character change -> another
> program ) :-/

Well, you know about "if str[0] == ?M", obviously.  What's wrong with that?
OK, it's not intuitive, but it's easy to learn and harmless.  I like it,
actually.  Like so much else in Ruby, it economises typing without sacrificing
readability.

?c        Ruby
'c'       Most other languages

That's a 33% saving in screen real estate for the reasonably common operation
of specifying a specific individual character.

> BTW is there any possibility to write blocks like we can write
> for i in [1,2,5,2,6,1,6]
>   puts i
> end
>
> But that time the each iterator is called, if I'm right.
> Can I use it with other procedures accepting a block?

No, only each.  I really like the "for a in x" syntax, but then when you make a
minor variation and have to use "each_with_index" instead of the implicit
"each", the code looks inconsistent, so most of the time I use explicit "each"
now.

> Gergo

Gavin