From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: 2004-02-01T06:19:53+09:00
Subject: Re: cascading message sends

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 11:16:50AM -0800, Paul MG wrote:
> In Smalltalk, which Ruby is much like in some ways, you can 'cascade'
> message sends. That is, call a bunch of methods on the same object
> without naming it explicitly over and over. Eg:
> 
>      aCollection add: 5; add: 7; add: 'foo' !
> 
> calls 'add' on 'aCollection' 3 times, sending 5, 7, and 'foo'.
> 
> Does Ruby have this syntax?

Others have mentioned a couple ways to do this generally, but
I just wanted to point out that you can do this without any 
special syntax as long as the methods involved return `self' -
which many do, including Array#push:

    aCollection = []
    aCollection.push(5).push(7).push('foo')
    [5, 7, "foo"]


Array#<< does, too, and long chains with it have less 
syntactic clutter:


    aCollection << 4 << 3 << 2
    [5, 7, "foo", 4, 3, 2]



-Mark