From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-06-28T02:30:39+09:00
Subject: Re: why can't I use $3somevar for global variable in ruby 1.8.0?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Klemme" <bob.news@gmx.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 3:03 AM
Subject: Re: why can't I use $3somevar for global variable in ruby 1.8.0?


>
> "WATANABE Hirofumi" <eban@os.rim.or.jp> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:4518-Fri27Jun2003134257+0900-eban@os.rim.or.jp...
> > Hi,
> >
> > Donglai Gong <donglai@MIT.EDU> writes:
> >
> >
> > > There must be a reason why $1ve is disallowed in 1.8.0 but I can't
> > > imagine why.  Anyone knows the reason behind this change?
>
> In most programming languages identifiers may not start with a digit.
> Same for Ruby.  You can't do class 3Foo; end either. Simply get used to
> not start identifiers with numbers.  The change just makes identifiers for
> global variables consistent with other identifiers.

But $3var doesn't start with a 3; it starts with a $.

This is historical Ruby behavior, but it seems to be
changing; I now see that @3var is also disallowed. (I
don't *think* it was in the past.)

> In Ruby there's the additional point that $1, $2 etc. are used for holding
> the contents of regexp sub pattern matches.

This is probably related to the change. I don't read
ruby-core, so I can't say for sure.

Hal

--
Hal Fulton
hal9000@hypermetrics.com