From: hipster <hipster@...4all.nl>
Date: 2000-10-10T23:26:17+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5382] Re: Allowing *ary's in the middle of a camma separated list

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000  23:16:11 +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In message "[ruby-talk:5373] Re: Allowing *ary's in the middle of a camma separated list"
>     on 00/10/10, "Akinori MUSHA" <knu@idaemons.org> writes:
> 
> |>   system 'rcsdiff', *(options+["-r#{revold}", "-r#{revnew}", "#{root}/#{file},v"])
> |
> |Well, yes, that's supposed to work, but I simply do not feel it's as
> |pretty as other parts of Ruby.  I mean, I just couldn't explain why
> |"proc(a, b, *c)" is allowed and "proc(a, *b, c)" or "proc(a, *b, *c)"
> |is not, considering Ruby's consistent nature.
> 
> It's consistent with the right hand side of assignment.  Well, let me
> consider it for a while.

An asterisk at other places than the end sounds ok, just need to count
the elements. More than one asterisk is inherently ambiguous however.
Take the proc(a, *b, *c) example with parameters 1, 2, 3, 4: after
a=1, how should 2, 3, 4 be distributed over *b and *c?

	Michel