From: Michael campbell <michael_s_campbell@...>
Date: 2004-02-01T06:34:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Save the flip/flop op!

Hal Fulton wrote:

> Phil Tomson wrote:
> 
>>> That's why I personally would like to see it gone, and good riddance. 
>>> You, of course, are welcome to root for a pardon, but I just wanted 
>>> to make sure the other side of the aisle was represented :-)
>>>
>> And just what would you replace that functionality with? 
> 
> 
> Phil,
> 
> I'm with Nathaniel. Save the functionality but please KILL the
> syntax. 

Well, I like the syntax, because I've trained my brain to understand it.  Would Ruby be as easy to read as it is now if all the reserved words were not in English (or in ANY known "natural" spoken language)?  My point here is that anything you dont yet understand, take the time to understand it.  The reason Ruby is easy now is only because you have the understanding of the context in/for which it was designed.

That said, if there were some method call which can do all of what (scalar)".." does, then fine.  The beauty of this operator is that each one has its own state (that I don't have to burn a variable to maintain on my own), so you can nest them, have several going at once, use them completely outside of the common per-line file processing model, etc.  

I THINK Hal's solution might work outside the file-by-line context

Every solution presented thus far assumes I want to use it only for processing text files line by line, when in reality, I might need it for many other things, totally unrelated to that.

> Only a perler could love it. (No offense meant.)

Playing devil's advocate...By extension then, I propose to also put up all the unixism's as candidates for removal too, as only people who are familiar with unix could love those too.  I have to read others' code, and I just have to grab a manual every time I see Enumerable#grep.