From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-01-16T00:53:08+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby-dev summary 19198-19345

On Thursday, January 16, 2003, 2:39:54 AM, Matt wrote:

> matz@ruby-lang.org (Yukihiro Matsumoto) writes:

>> Nobu already made a patch to implement it.  I feel like it can make
>> programs more cryptic.  "<<-|FOO"??  WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

> I just though, why not "<<|FOO".  In other words, the '-' in there
> doesn't serve much purpose.

> s = <<|FOO
>       |this
>       | is
>       |  my
>       |   text
>       FOO

To me, the '-' means the same that it always does: it allows the
end-of-document marker to be indented.  I don't see why that should
change.  In other words, the example given above is an incomplete
here-document, based on the assumption in the following section.

What happens if a here-doc is specified to have the left margin ('|')
but for one or more lines it is not used, as in:

   s = <<-|EOS
     | One
     |   Two
           Three
     |   Four
   EOS

   puts s

I think the correct output is:
 One
   Two
           Three
   Four
(end of output)

In that case, it's pretty easy to see what becomes of the quoted
example at the top.  The fifth line is "       FOO".

At the end of the day, the "-" and (proposed) "|" features of Ruby
here-documents are independent of each other.

Gavin