From: "Ara.T.Howard" <ahoward@...>
Date: 2003-12-19T06:51:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Yukihiro - Please ensure backwards compatibility

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Elias Athanasopoulos wrote:

> Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 03:12:57 +0900
> From: Elias Athanasopoulos <elathan@phys.uoa.gr>
> Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
> Subject: Re: Yukihiro - Please ensure backwards compatibility
> 
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:39:53PM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> > On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 11:01:56 +0900, Joseph Benik wrote:
> > > i don't understand the need to nitpick the regexp in this case, if
> > > someone passes a string it seems quite a simple task for you to _ENSURE
> > > BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY_ and convert it internally to a regexp
> > 
> > This is a deprecation warning. It will no longer be backwards compatible in 
> > 1.9 and later, IIRC (maybe as early as 1.8.1).
> > 
> > In 1.8.0, however, it's just a warning.
> 
> I had this "problem", too. I can't see why Ruby is so verbose on that
> and doesn't interpret foo.gsub[!]("bar", ...) as foo.gsub[!](/bar/, ...) 

> automagically...
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

this word is the reason for many, many, many hours spent debugging perl
scripts.  if you have done much perl programming you will know exactly what i
mean.

i'm all for backward compatibility - unless the 'old' way wasn't all that good.
IMHO, it wasn't all that good to be able to do this (same situation as gsub)


# why doesn't this work, after all my string does start with an 'a'?

  ~ > ruby16 -e 'puts( ("^a" =~ "ara") && "matched!" )'
  nil


# oh right, wrong dang order - there went 10 minutes!

   ~ > ruby16 -e 'puts( ("ara" =~ "^a") && "matched!" )'
  matched!



# now under ruby18 we are notified and have plenty of time to correct before
# 1.9.  backward compat is also preserved.

  ~ > ruby18 -e 'puts( ("ara" =~ "^a") && "matched!" )'
  -e:1: warning: string =~ string will be obsolete; use explicit regexp
  matched!

  ~ > ruby18 -e 'puts( ("^a" =~ "ara") && "matched!" )'
  -e:1: warning: string =~ string will be obsolete; use explicit regexp
  nil
 

i'm all for this break of backward compat... my 2 cents.

-a
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