From: Yohanes Santoso <ysantoso@...>
Date: 2002-12-12T03:40:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Bit syntax

"Bulat Ziganshin" <bulatz@integ.ru> writes:

> Hello Martin,
> 
> Wednesday, December 11, 2002, 2:17:32 PM, you wrote:
> 
> MD> Came across this in the lambda weblog, where the poster said
> 
> MD>    The Erlang Bit Syntax extends pattern matching to (de)constructing
> MD>    chunks of binary data, such as the bit-encoded headers in network
> MD>    protocols and file formats. It's an amazingly handy language
> MD>    extension.
> 
> sorry, but ruby don't have pattern matching even for regular data
> structures. it too FP-style ;) it is not the same as regular
> expression matching (as you think)

I failed to see the FP-ness of Erlang Bit Syntax's pattern
matching. On the other hand, I see this as a handy feature as it
allows ruby to be easily used in doing bit manipulation. 

However, I do not think that Ruby syntax needs to be changed to
accomodate this. It seems that all functionalities of Erlang Bit
Syntax can be done in pure-ruby, i.e., the functionalities for
bit-manipulating can all simply provided in a native ruby module.

YS.