From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-07-31T23:37:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby could be wildly more popular if it had ...

On Thursday, July 31, 2003, 8:58:48 PM, Robert wrote:


> "Arthur" <arthur8@boardermail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:16e0bc53.0307310222.11587422@posting.google.com...
>> "Gavin Sinclair" <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> wrote in message
> news:<60107.203.185.214.34.1059543084.squirrel@webmail.imagineis.com>...
>> > > On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 22:30, Robert Klemme wrote:
>> > >
>> > >> My solution is to use {} for one line blocks and do..end for more
>> > >> complicated things.
>> > >
>> > > I tried this style for a while.  But then every time I added lines
> to a
>> > > one-line block, I had to change {} to do/end.
>> > >
>> > > Today I normally used {} on all blocks, except in Rake files.
>> >
>> >
>> > My take is: {} are for functional blocks; do..end for procedural
> blocks.
>> > That shows me which expressions are important for their results, and
> which
>> > are not.
>> >
>> > Gavin
>>
>>
>> This sounds very interesting.  Can you expand upon this a little?
>> What do you take as the difference between procedural blocks and
>> funcitonal blocks?  Can you provide an example?

> I guess he means

> (0..10).each do |i|; puts i; end
> (0..10).map {|i| i+i}

>     robert

Precisely.  Some blocks are called to _do_ something, and some are
called to _evaluate_ to something (or, to _return_ something).  That's
a high-level difference that is important to understanding high-level
program flow, so providing a visual signal in the code is some help to
me.

It turns out that most functional blocks are one-liners, like:

  set.find { |e| e.satisfies condition }

But then you get some larger ones:

  set.map { |e|
    if something
      e.x
    else
      e.y
    end
  }

do...end looks silly on one line, though, so I always spread that out:

  people.each do |p|
    process(p)
  end

I figure the concept there is worth devoting three lines to.

Cheers,
Gavin