From: "Ara.T.Howard" <ahoward@...>
Date: 2004-02-25T07:54:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Need examples comparing Ruby to Python

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, David MacQuigg wrote:

> I'm not seeing any fundamental advantage of Ruby blocks over Python
> functions.  

there are no fundamental advantages of _any_ turing complete language over
another correct?  iff so this is kindof a moot statement.  however there is a
'difference': blocks form closures, function calls do not:

  def callback; yield; end
  def a_callback? x; x = 42; end

  x = nil
  callback{ x = 42 }
  p x                   # => 42

  x = nil
  a_callback? x
  p x                   # => nil


> If your block is more than one line, or needs a print statement, just give
> it a name and let it be a function.  lambda's are used only for very short
> blocks, where for example, you want to pass a simple function in an argument
> list, but don't want to waste a line giving that function a name.

technically speaking (see above) this is true.  however, consider apis which
have a massive proliferation of callbacks passed using blocks - say a gui api.
writing a separate method for each button may be over kill and not lend itself
to abstraction very well.  there were a series of articles onlines recently
where matz said something about concentrating on the human aspect of computing
and that really rang true to me, what i mean is:

would you rather see

  comment = %r/^\s*#/o 
  empty = %r/^\s*$/o

  open(path).each do |line|
    next if line =~ emtpy or line =~ comment 
    key, value = line.split(%r/=/o).map{|x| x.strip}
    opts[key] = value
  end

or

  f = open(path)
  comment = %r/^\s*#/o 
  empty = %r/^\s*$/o

  begin
    while((line = f.gets))
      next if line =~ emtpy or line =~ comment 
      parse_line line, opts
    end
  ensure
    f.close
  end

# insert 1000 lines of source code here so pare_line is nice and tough to find

  def parse_line line, opts
    key, value = line.split(%r/=/o).map{|x| x.strip}
    opts[key] = value
  end


doesn't matter?  how about if there a 50 of them?  100?  if there were a
hundred of them would you rather see

  handlers = Hash[
    :foobar => proc{|arg| p arg},
    :barfoo => proc{|arg| raise arg},
    :foo    => proc{|arg| throw arg},
    # 100 more...
  ]


or

  # these are handlers - have fun naming all of them
  def foobar arg; p arg; end
  def barfoo arg; raise arg; end
  def foo arg;    throw arg; end
  # 100 more...

now say you actually had to pass 20 or so handlers to a method - how would you
do this with functions?  it would surely be uglier than:

  parse_config handlers

obviously you could maintain a string list of all the handlers and keep it in
sync with your definitions.... (sounds like a job for code generation -
tedious!)

see what i'm driving at: skipping around the source finding all those defs can
be frustrating and lead to errors.  the stack overhead is also higher - though
that probably _really_ is moot!  ;-) 

> I like Ruby's more compact |x| instead of Python's keyword - lambda x: - but
> that is just my personal preference.

that's as 'fundamental' as it gets with turing languages - look no further! ;-)

truely - much research has been done to correlate a programmer's productivity
with lines of code written - NOT with the type of code, in otherwords:

  'compact' => 'advantage'

and, i beleive, this relationship is some sort of exponential curve.

cheers.

-a
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