Thoughts on Ruby

Hi all,

I'm a Ruby newbie, and I'm reading now "the ruby way" and reading this 
book some comments make me think.
I've a strong  Smalltalk heritage,  so I'm somewhat biassed.

I would like to know...

Why does common operators like "=" , "and", " .." , "or"  etc ... can 
not be overloaded or redefined ?, maybe the complexity of the Ruby 
parser comes from the fact that everything is ALMOST an object or a 
method. Why is not "=" a method ? Same question for "and" and the rest 
of operators that can not be redefined, Does the actual implementation 
make life easier for the designer ? I say so because for me is more 
natural when everything is an object (without exceptions, here Ruby 
follows the rule pretty well) and a method is a method ever, not 
sometimes. Some methods are keywords, and some other are not v.g. loop 
vs. while. The every call is a method could simplify greatly the sintax 
parser (look at the Smalltalk parser).

Why  primitives are hidden ? In smalltalk you can call a primitive every 
time you want with a  <primitive: aNumber> , this way the implementation 
of native methods, and in some way native Classes like String are not 
hidden from the programmer, freeing the programmer to change the 
behaviour if needed. Yes you can have the "required" clause and use 
binary libraries, but would not be much more "natural" to have a 
"require string" when you want to invoque string libraries instead of 
having them loaded all the time ?. I want to say here that the 
"primitive" keyword frees the language from it's implementation. This 
favours the everything is a module aproach.

Sintax Sugar (SS), other thing difficult to understand for me, the 
question here is why ? Everything has exceptions very few things are 
orthogonal with the principe that must drive it, you can wite a.+(3) or 
a + 3 or a.+ 3 or a hundred other ways to write the same thing, yes, 
this gives you freedom, but a bad deserved (not needed) one. I use one 
form, but when I read programs from other persons the code seems strange 
and somewhat dificult to read. Sometimes SS is right, v.g. x +=1, but 
the every call is a method aproach could give you the same results 
without trouble, in this case += could  be a method. As could be "++" or 
others.

Undeclared variables, I don't know other people but I do fast typing and 
writing  "aVariable" and "aVariabel" is a mistake that I can do very 
easily. Yes you can say, type more slowly, but this is not a solution, I 
would like to have a way to force the compiler to generate a warning 
when I use a non pre-declared (or pre asigned) variable.

Why are Strings arrays of integers ? aString[0] is an integer, yes, it's 
the way it is, but I would like to have String as an array of chars, and 
char if you want as a descendant of Integer (nice election because a 
Unicode String is and array of double chars i.e. integer), I don't know 
you, but for me aString[i].chr =='x' is somewhat unnatural, because it 
breaks the semantic of a String, so it's not intuitive for me.

Why is Ruby an interpreter ? Yes the less traditional bytecode aproach, 
can be harder (or not), but enables external optimizations more easily 
(JIT and similars) because the language are separated from the 
implementation, enables reduced footprint and gives faster execution 
times, yes, look at how Self executes programs, it's amazingly fast (and 
incredibly complex also), but a separated implementation could help 
develop better Ruby-engines.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that Ruby is a young language that 
needs some maturing, and I love how easy is to learn, it's dinamicity 
and the fact that is a kind of mix between my loved Smalltalk, Self and 
other languages. In fact I'm writing this because I want to understand 
Ruby better and becasue I want to make some suggestions for future 
releases, maybe Mr. Matsumoto would like to consider some of them

There are more things that I see as strange in Ruby, but this is enought 
for now .....

Please if I've make any inaccuracy , don't be too rude with me, I'm 
still learning, and I've a loooong way before understand everyting. I'm 
just looking for answers.

Enric