From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2004-03-24T01:12:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby style guidance (was: Re: Need some advice on PickAxe II)

Hi --

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Lothar Scholz wrote:

> Ruby is the successor of Perl, so there are many ways to do it.
> There is no consistent style in the standard library. It is written by
> a lot of persons and in 1.8 a lot of files are included that nobody
> expected to be ever in the standart library.

I am reminded of my favorite (unfortunately anonymous) quotation from
RubyGarden:

  I would like to evolve FROM Perl, Java and C++ rather than TO Perl,
  Java and C++.

I would add: thankfully, while Ruby is quite versatile, "TMTOWTDI"
isn't "the Ruby motto" :-)

As for coding style: it's true that the library is written by many
people, and there are some differences of style, but when it comes to
things like indenting by two spaces, or avoiding camelCase for
variables, the practices in the library are on the whole very
consistent -- certainly orders of magnitude away from a random
distribution.  It's definitely a good resource for people who want to
get a good sense of traditional style.


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net