From: David Garamond <lists@...6.isreserved.com>
Date: 2004-04-22T00:57:29+09:00
Subject: Re: A Ruby WishList

I'll comment on some.

James, Roshan (Cognizant) wrote:
> I recently wrote a blog entry about a WishList for Ruby and I would like
> to get your responses about it. It is a rather lengthy entry, which is
> why I am not posting th entire netry itself to the list.
> http://pensieve.thinkingms.com/CommentView,guid,1a1045a1-bec1-45c7-97e9-
> f3c9f7937cc7.aspx
> 
> To summarise briefly, I have mentioned: 
>  - Threading support

Coming in Rite or Cardinal (Ruby on Parrot). Rite might have both green 
and OS threads.

>  - C/Cpp style operators

As Mauricio has mentioned, has been discussed many times.

  http://www.ruby-talk.com/blade/2710
  http://www.ruby-talk.com/blade/5961

>  - Ruby on .Net

There has been some efforts on this. This will require at least a 
partial rewrite of Ruby probably to C#. I'd rather see Ruby being ported 
to Parrot first though (Parrot will also run on Windows and a myriad 
others that .NET/Mono won't).

>  - Auto initialisation of variables

If you don't declare variables first, Ruby can't know if it's a method 
or a local variable:

  def sum; ...; end
  def sum=; ...; end
  sum = sum+1   # this will invoke the sum and sum= methods.

  sum = 2
  sum = sum+1   # this will increment the sum local variable.

  sum           # now if you don't declare it first, what is sum? a
                # method or a local variable

However, you don't need to predeclare $global or Constant because they 
can't be confused with methods.

  --
dave