From: dejaspam@... (Bill Atkins)
Date: 2004-04-15T03:24:16+09:00
Subject: Comments on Ruby

I've been using Ruby for about a month now and it's become my favorite
language by far.  I don't know if RCR's are still being accepted, but
I know you're supposed to post changes here before submitting.  So
here are some things I've noticed.  I don't know if any are worthy of
change requests, but here they are.

1.  def ought to return a Method object.  Just because.  Having def
return an object adds a little bit of consistency, IMO.

2.  Top-level defs should be singleton methods in an Object instance
dedicated to that file.  It's messy that a top-level def can be called
on any object.

3.  The pipes on a parameter list for a do block ought to be optional.
 I'm not sure about this one.

4.  caller should provide the sender of the current message.

5.  All special $ variables out to be deprecated or even removed.

6.  There ought to be some way to assign to a receiver object, or
overload = or something.

7.  Perhaps some kind of site-level initialization file in
lib/site_ruby that would be called before any script is loaded to add
methods to the default classes.

Some of these are probably crazy.  Please don't take offense to them.

That's all I have for now.