From: Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak@...>
Date: 2002-12-13T06:39:21+09:00
Subject: Re: [YANQ] -yet another (ruby) newbie question -string#concat

Mon, 9 Dec 2002 19:08:43 +0900, Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> pisze:

> There's nothing really confusing about objects being modified.
> All data can be modified, so why not the data in objects?  I think
> you need to treat your symptoms like a fear of spiders: confront
> your fear, modify every object in sight until you are used to it ;)
> (just kidding, of course)

Well, functional programming is a paradigm that avoids modifying
objects, and it produces readable and concise programs. There is
nothing strange in treating data as immutable :-)

You can program in more functional style in Ruby if you wish. It's
great that it also provides those non-! methods. The style can be
mixed - some people prefer to modify more, some less.

Ruby doesn't has that much library support for immutable data as
typical functional languages though - there are no Lisp-style lists
or functional dictionaries for example.

String is the primary type which usually makes sense to avoid
modifying, even if you can. You can create a new string locally in
a function and incrementally build it, but better avoid functions
which modify their arguments.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak@knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/