From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2003-06-12T14:39:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby advantages over Perl

In article <20030612022421.GZ22846@ouroboros.anu.edu.au>,
Iain Truskett  <spoon@dellah.org> wrote:
>* Phil Tomson (ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com) [12 Jun 2003 11:58]:
>
>[...]
>> 1) Built-in types like Array seem to have more methods that work on them 
>> than Perl's.  ie. you can do this out of the box in Ruby, but I don't 
>> think you can in Perl:
>
>> a = ['a','b','c','d','e']
>> b = a - ['c']
>> #b => ["a", "b", "d", "e"]
>
>There's no operator overloading of this sort, no. Of course,
>this particular task could be viewed as a convenient fa�ade
>to the find and reject methods, which perl has as the grep
>function.
>
>    @b = grep { $_ != 4 } @a;
>    b = a.reject { |e| e == 4 }

I didn't mean to imply it was impossible in Perl, but it's much easier and 
more convenient in Ruby.

>
>[...]
>> 3) any type of object can be used as a key in a Ruby hash (Perl can
>> only use strings as keys).
>
>Although it should be noted that references will be happily
>stringified if used as keys and that there is a core module
>Tie::RefHash that lets you use 'real' references as keys.
>
>[...]

Fair enough.

>> 5) yield and code blocks
>
>These are trivial to implement, you just end up with a few
>more keywords.

I'm a bit skeptical that it would be trivial to implement yield in Perl.
....not saying it would be impossible to implement, but I'm thinking it 
wouldn't be trivial.

>
>Basically, the main difference I usually see between Perl
>and Ruby is that Ruby just gives you less 'noise'. Take away
>various characters from a Perl program and you approach the
>Ruby one. Start restructuring your code to be more Rubyish,
>you lose even more.
>
>You can do anything in Perl that you can in Ruby, it's just
>that some things may require you to pull in a module or
>write a few more characters.

True.  Languages influence how we think about problems, and while you can 
program in a Perlish way in Ruby (a lot of us started out that way ;-) 
it's probably more difficult (or it doesn't occur to the Perl programmer) 
to program in a Rubyish way in Perl.

Phil