From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: 2003-07-17T00:08:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Keyword "with"

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 11:47:39PM +0900, Peter Hickman wrote:
> If we really wanted a kitchen sink language we would drop Ruby here and 
> now and start using Lisp and Ada. But no one likes to spend their day at 
> the kitchen sink.

> All I ask it that the request adds functionality to the language and not 
> sugar. 'with', 'x++', 'elseif', 'new' and the rest are just plain sugar.

Well, then you should *like* Common Lisp and Ada.  They have lots of
functionality, but not much sugar. :)

But there's nothing wrong with sugar, syntactic or otherwise.  Many of
the things I like about various programming languages falls squarely
in the "sugar" category.  The heart of usability in general is usualy
redundancy and shortcuts - basically, a general lack of strict
adherence to orthogonality (what Larry Wall calls "diagonality").
This is as true for usability of programming languages as it
is in other arenas.

Besides, many of Ruby's built-in classes and modules are already
full of sugar - duplicated functionality with multiple interfaces.
Method names that are exact synonyms, operators that accomplish
the same thing as a method call, etc.  Adding more would hardly
be a case of tarnishing a previously minimal design. :)

-Mark