From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2004-02-01T06:49:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Save the flip/flop op!

Michael campbell wrote:
> 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.

Well, it runs counter to the rest of Ruby.

Since x..y is a range, and never evaluates to false or nil, I would
expect it always to be true.

> 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.

That may be. (My solution of course was extremely half-baked.) In that
case, I'd suggest a class for that purpose. A class as general-purpose
as possible.

>> 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.

I see your point, but I don't admit the correspondence. (My turn to play
devil's advocate.)

I didn't mean it was ugly and obtuse because it came from Perl. Many
Perlism are easy to grasp. I'd be lost without =~ and regex literals.

I meant it was ugly and obtuse, and no one would ever think otherwise
unless he was used to Perl.

As for the Unixisms: There are some I have trouble with, and I have used
Uniux off and on since the early 80s.

I don't know if you're serious about "grep" or not. My only complaint
with it is the name. A unixism which has a nonintuitive name should
perhaps have an intuitive alias.

This reminds me of a BBS I was designing with a friend back in 1990 or
so. We wanted to put in a scheduling mechanism for the sysop, and we
debated how to implement it and what to call it. "Call it 'cron'," he
said. "We are *not* calling it 'cron'," I told him.


Hal