From: nobu.nokada@...
Date: 2004-04-15T12:12:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Comments on Ruby

Hi,

At Thu, 15 Apr 2004 03:24:16 +0900,
Bill Atkins wrote in [ruby-talk:97173]:
> 1.  def ought to return a Method object.  Just because.  Having def
> return an object adds a little bit of consistency, IMO.

Method object is not method itself, rather a wrapper for it,
whereas Class is the class itself.  I feel Symbol would be
enough.

> 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.

If you feel so, don't use top-level methods, define in
meta class.

  class << self
    def foo
    end
  end

Methods need to be visible everywhere would be top-level.

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

By "pipes", do you mean this?

  foo do |this| end

Then, it's optional, you can omit it if you don't use it.

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

Particular method instead of parsing strings?

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

It will.

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

Assignment is not an operation on an object.

> 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.

Use RUBYOPT environment variable.

-- 
Nobu Nakada