From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-11-04T07:12:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Ruby

Hi,

In message "Re: Thoughts on Ruby"
    on 02/11/03, Albert Wagner <alwagner@tcac.net> writes:

|Smalltalk is pure OOP.  Ruby is not.  In Smalltalk the "operators" are simply 
|messages to an object.  In Ruby "operators" are neither objects nor messages, 
|but are rather handled as in more conventional languages.  I don't know why 
|Matz only went part way.   This part-way-ness is also visible in other 
|aspects of the language such as "if", "while", etc.  In Ruby these things 
|also are neither object nor message. Whereas in Smalltalk, such constructs 
|are messages to a Boolean object. 

They simply cannot implemented as methods.

"=" is assignment, which is not a method even in Smalltalk (:=).
""and", "or" and ".." are control structures, which also are *not*
methods in most implementation of Smalltalk.

							matz.