[ruby-talk:00570] Re: New feature request! :-)

On  6 Aug, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> 
> In message "[ruby-talk:00567] New feature request! :-)"
>     on 99/08/06, [e-mail] <[e-mail]> writes:
> 

[...]

> I think the last one reqiures the backslash at the end of line.
> 
> e.g.
> |		a = "Hello"\
> |		    "World"
> 
> I can tell that now you are really using Ruby all the time. ;-)

Eh! I really do it! :-)

BTW: I have another question yet: I have to write a converter, that
reads a file and put it into a dbs. That converter is part of a VERY
large product currently under developement by a consortium of 4-5
companies.

Now I would like to ask you, whether the Ruby license allow us to use
Ruby for that purpose? Our company wouldn't allow to publish the
sources!!! :-(

But of course, I would publish libraries written in Ruby, that could be
of common interest, if I write such!

But back to the topic... :-)

> 
> Anyway, my idea concerning this issue are:
> 
>   * Ruby requires the backslash at the end of line too, which is very
>     ugly, methink. 

That I do agree! In the past I hated the `;' to close a statement. But
today, after some years, I like it somewhat more. Because it is very
comfortable for having statements longer than one line. :-(

But Ruby already do a good job to detect, whether a statement is really
finished or not. :-)

But here, IMHO, Ruby would not need the `\'! Because if Ruby find two
string literals following each other with *ONLY* whitespaces
in-between, it could simply concatenate them; or is there something I
miss here?

A string statement (means a line with only a string) makes no sense, or?

> 
>   * String concatenation is not that heavy unless it appears in inner
>     most loop.

Ohh! It is ;-) If the parser could do it, it would costs 0 us during
runtime. If you have to do it yourself, it costs xxx us. That is much
more, isn't it? ;-))))

On every case, it is a penalty!

> 
>   * How about using here-document?  Like:
> 
> 		raise TypeError, <<EOS
> This is a very long string that doesn't fit very well on a single source line
> EOS

Of course, but it is very very ugly! My proposal is, to let the code
looks much prettier! :-)

>                                                         matz.

\cle