From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2004-01-22T06:12:37+09:00
Subject: Re: New to Python: my impression v. Perl/Ruby

Quoteing ggarramuno@aol.com, on Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 05:59:58AM +0900:
> 
> for i in (0..i); something; end
> 
> to me has a bunch of advantages over times, step and the such.  With the above
> construct you know that:
> a) i has to be a number

Are you sure? Can't i be a RegEx? If not, the .. operator is a special
case. Most operators are user definable:

  j = i + 1

Is i necessarily a number? Nope. What does that statement do? Depends on
what i is! And j, for that matter.

Why is

  i.times { ... }

any more or less confusing than

  c.each { ... }

or indeed

  o.do_me { ... }

Unless you know the type of the object, you don't know what the method
does.  Of course, there are naming conventions (#each, #times) for
methods with commonly similar behaviour.

This is the kind of thing people who don't like OO at all, preferring
procedural languages, say about OO ("you never know what the call really
does"). Well, that's an ancient flame war, but if you're using an OO
language, I'd think you'd be on the OO side of the argument by now...

Sam