From: paulmg@... (Paul MG)
Date: 2004-02-02T02:49:52+09:00
Subject: Re: cascading message sends

"Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@mail.com> wrote in message news:<20040131211520.GA15084@mulan.thereeds.org>...

> 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.

It's lucky that in Ruby Array#push and Array#<< do return self; unlike
Smalltalk's Collection>>add: anItem which returns anItem (I believe).

However as I said in the PS to my original post, I was curious about
what can be done in Ruby in the general case.

Aside: The things people have been able to do in suggesting ways to
get this behaviour have really illustrated to me the power of the
language: there seems to be something almost LISP-like in the way you
can extend nearly everything about the language, eg adding methods to
Object, Kernel, etc. Very impressive. I think Python is cute (and i
have to admit to preferring syntactically-significant-indentation to
ruby's "end" keyword) but Ruby seems to clearly trounce it for sheer
power.

Thanks for everyone's thoughts!

cheers:)
Paul