From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2003-09-22T00:47:19+09:00
Subject: Re: RCR: New interpreter switch

Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> wrote:
> On Sunday, September 21, 2003, 11:46:33 PM, Martin wrote:
> 
>> One place where perl's heavy use of implicit variables scores is in
>> quick one-liners from the command prompt. I think ruby would be more
>> appealing in that area if it had a switch that ran the following loop:
> 
>> while gets
>>   print $_.instance_eval {
>>     ...
>>   }
>> end
> 
>> This would generalise the existing technique of mixing a few String
>> methods like gsub and scan into Kernel and having them act implicitly on
>> $_.
> 
> 
> An alternative would be to create a file that adds all the methods you
> want to Kernel, and require that on the command line.  Just a thought.

I thought of that - it doesn't work because in several cases you're
still left with having to assign the result to $_ or call print/puts
explicitly. A method that will work is to wrap a shell script around
ruby, that puts the loop and the instance_eval in for you. But it'd be
nicer to see it as a switch.

martin