From: Joseph McDonald <joe@...>
Date: 2000-12-08T05:40:05+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:6913] Re: array of hashes


"Dave Thomas" <Dave@thomases.com> wrote in message
news:m2g0k06mrq.fsf@zip.local.thomases.com...

> There's a rumor that the next version of Ruby will feature active
> defaults, allowing you to do this kind of thing automatically.

That would be great!  It would also be nice if fixnums and strings
sprang into existence as not nil, so you could start using them
right away (in a loop for instance).  good defaults would be "0" and ""

I would only like to see this for local variables, not instance variables or
globals.
The reason is that the defaults could lead to bugs based on spellings
of the variable names, but if it's just local variables, you usually have
all of them in front of you in the (hopefully) small block.   But instance
variables could be all over the place in a fairly large file, thus
mis-spellings
could prove to be a nasty source of bugs.

thanks,
-joe