From: Florian Frank <flori@...>
Date: 2003-08-22T19:50:15+09:00
Subject: Re: What attracts me to Ruby

On 2003-08-21 03:37:20 +0900, Dan Doel wrote:
> For example:
> 
> re = /(.)(.)((.).)/
> match = re.match "abcd"
> 
> if match
>    p match[0]
>    p match[1]
>    p match[2]
>    p match[3]
>    p match[4]
> end

I try to minimize the usage of the Perl special variables in Ruby, too.
But sometimes they can't be avoided. An idiom I use fairly often is
this:

case string
when /(\d+)/ then puts "Numeric: " + $1
when /([A-Za-z]+)/ then puts "Alphabetic: " + $~[1]
end

It doesn't seem to be possible to get the return value of the === method
in a general way either. A cleaner solution without special variables
would require a syntax change for the case expression similar to that:

case string as match
when /(\d+)/ then puts "Numeric: " + match[1]
when /([A-Za-z]+)/ then puts "Alphabetic: " + match[1]
end

match would be assigned to <when expression> === string if the keyword
"as" is used to allow postprocessing in the when clauses.

-- 
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without
newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a
moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should
receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
  -- Thomas Jefferson