From: Robert Gustavsson <robertg@...>
Date: 2001-01-06T03:59:09+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:8704] Braces and begin/end

Hi!

I opened parse.y and made a serious try to understand why but my knowledge
of the parser generator language in parse.y is nil so I will once again
annoy you fellas with a newbie question:

The construction below does not work:
------------------------
a = 10
{
  print a, "\n"
  a -= 1
} while a > 0
------------------------

Ruby says:
------------------------
Ruby1:4: parse error
  print a, "\n"
         ^
Ruby1:4: parse error
Ruby1:6: parse error
} while a > 0
 ^(SyntaxError)

    from Ruby1
------------------------

But if I replace { and } with begin and end it works:

------------------------
a = 10
begin
  print a, "\n"
  a -= 1
end while a > 0
------------------------

Silly me thought that {} and begin/end was synonyms.

Apparantly they aren't. Why not? Any other pitfalls about {} and begin/end
one should be aware of?

I must say that ruby-talk is a very positive experience so far. Very prompt
and competent replies and very kind and helpful people. Hopefully I will
gain some knowledge about Ruby to be able to contribute.

Robert