From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2002-12-06T07:06:31+09:00
Subject: Re: elseif?


Hi,

From: "Ted" <ted@datacomm.com>

> > But we already have aliases all over the place in the classes
> > and libraries.  Look at just the Array class:
> > 
> > collect! map!
> > size length
> > indices indexes
> > slice [ ]
> > to_ary to_a
>
>
> Yuk!  Ruby was presented to me as a 'clean' language.
> Aliases are -- in my not-so-humble-opinion -- an abomination.
> Aliases mean that when reading someone else's code you have to remember TWO things instead of one.
> They serve no purpose except the preservation of the status quo of a cat-heard of programmers.

I used to think these kinds of aliases were kind of quirky when I first read 
through Pickaxe learning Ruby... However, in some code I wrote last night,
I used collect and map one right after another.  Because the particular
naming in this context seemed more appropriately analogous to what the
code was doing...  The lines are:

  image_filenames.map! {|fname| File.basename(fname, ".jpg") }

  bead_shots = image_filenames.collect {|fname| BeadShot.new(fname) }


...See?  'Cause I wanted to "map" the filenames to some alternate
arrangement; but I wanted to "collect" BeadShot objects from the 
filenames!  :-)  I thought it was pretty cool that Ruby allowed me to
specify my intent in a way that seemed so natural to me...  I could
envision using :size vs. :length similarly...

(to_ary and to_a?  well.... dunno about that :)


Just my thoughts . . .


Regards,

Bill