From: Chris Pine <nemo@...>
Date: 2003-04-25T23:30:25+09:00
Subject: Re: How to call an object instance's method?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Candler" <B.Candler@pobox.com>

The more I think about this, the more I think that either:
- the 1.6.8 behaviour is better, or
- make poetry mode compulsory: that is, disallow parentheses around
  argument lists altogether, to eliminate the ambiguity.
----------------------------

Or make poetry mode illegal.  (Not a great option, but I had to throw it in
for completeness.)



----------------------------
The latter would make the language less C-like, and would force you to write

    (sin a) + b

instead of

    sin(a) + b

What do people think of that??

----------------------------

That is really cool!  But I think ruby is too old for such a change.
Anyway, what would this code do?

  sin a + b . abs

It seems such things should be clear.  Without adding parens *everywhere*
(and becoming Lisp), I don't see how it would be easy to understand what the
above does.  (Of course, I wouldn't know what the above does in Ruby 1.6 or
1.8, either, without trying it in irb first; is it good that we have irb for
such things, or is it bad that I need it for such things?)  Are you saying
that methods are greedy for arguments?  Then I guess the above would be:

  sin(a + (b.abs))

Actually, that seems pretty reasonable... but this is still going to throw
people off:

  sin(a+b) . abs

which would really be:

  sin((a+b).abs)

Perhaps people would get used to it if there wasn't already so much ruby
code with the parens like they are now... but, like I said, I think Ruby is
too old for such a change.


Chris