From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2003-07-17T02:47:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Keyword "with"

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 11:56:56PM +0900, Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> > 
> > Actually, VB complements the 'with' block with a unary . operator, which
> > is IMO the cleanest way to scope both local and object variables and
> > methods. At least, when I thought of the instance_eval/with trick, I
> > gave up on it because I couldn't think of a way to simulate unary .s
> 
> Now there's a thought. The unary . is not so
> bad in my opinion. We already have the unary ::
> in Ruby (::X means Object::X).

both 'with' and the unary '.' imply the existence of a default variable.
Now consider the following:
 * matz (and most people here) dislikes perlish things such as $! $: ...
 * the default variable looks suspiciously like $_ (and by its very
 nature it's essentially perlish and scheduled to be phased out)
...

And coming back to the 'with' thing: although I reinvented it in the
past I don't think it's going to be that useful: the proposed usage is 

anAwfulLongIdentifierThatYouWontLiktToTypeOften = "foo"

with anAwfulLongIdentifierThatYouWontLiktToTypeOften do
  puts length
  concat "bar"
  puts length
  puts self
end

but
 1) why would anybody choose such a long identifier? After all, it's a
 local whose name can be taken freely. Arguing that it's necessary to
 prevent name collisions is IMHO mistaken: a method should normally not
 have so many variables that long names are needed.
 If you're losing clearness inside the 'with' block, why not make a
 better trade-off on variable assignment ("declaration")?
 2) you can always do
   a = anAwfulLongIdentifierThatYouWontLiktToTypeOften 
   puts a.length 
   ....
   The only drawback is having to invent a new name. There's no
   performance impact, very unlike 'with'.

-- 
 _           _                             
| |__   __ _| |_ ___ _ __ ___   __ _ _ __  
| '_ \ / _` | __/ __| '_ ` _ \ / _` | '_ \ 
| |_) | (_| | |_\__ \ | | | | | (_| | | | |
|_.__/ \__,_|\__|___/_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_|
	Running Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable)
batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com

<SomeLamer> what's the difference between chattr and chmod?
<SomeGuru> SomeLamer: man chattr > 1; man chmod > 2; diff -u 1 2 | less
	-- Seen on #linux on irc