From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-07-17T04:28:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Other languages' features in Ruby

On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 04:14:26AM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 02:20:25 +0900, Brian Candler wrote:
> > would give warnings about "gets", "chomp!" and "puts" being used only
> > once in the source file...
> 
> Not chomp! -- AFAICT, the only place that ? and ! are allowed are on method
> names.

Oh yes, thanks for pointing that out. But I think the point stands: it is
not useful to warn on "a = foo" when foo doesn't appear anywhere else in the
source file, because it could legitimately be a method of the object or one
of its ancestor classes. Even if there were declarations for local variables
it wouldn't make sense:
   my :foo      # hypothetical declaration
   puts foob    # foob could still be a method

So, without introducing syntax for variables (%foo) or eliminating the
default receiver (self.puts self.foob) then I don't think there's a way to
give a useful warning for this case. Like I say, it used to worry me, since
Perl did catch quite a few of my typos in that way, but now I just run my
test suite and pick up the typos there...

Regards,

Brian.