Re: How's ruby compare to it older brother python

At 03:29 27/04/2004 +0900, you wrote:
>"Phil Tomson" <[e-mail]> wrote in message
>news:[e-mail]...
> > In article <[e-mail]>,
> > John Roth <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > >
> > >"Hunn E. Balsiche" <[e-mail]> wrote in message
> > >news:c6ich0$c5mee$[e-mail]...
> > >> in term of its OO features, syntax consistencies, ease of use, and
>their
> > >> development progress. I have not use python but heard about it quite
> > >often;
> > >> and ruby, is it mature enough to be use for developing serious
> > >application,
> > >> e.g web application as it has not many features in it yet.
> > >
> > >As another poster has mentioned, Ruby is more closely related
> > >to Perl than to Python. While I don't use it, people I respect who
> > >have moved to Ruby say it has a couple of real killer features;
> > >in particular the way blocks and the pervasive use of the visitor
> > >pattern come together change the way one writes programs for
> > >the better.
> > >
> > >As far as syntax is concerned, there doesn't seem to be a
> > >huge amount of difference. Syntax is syntax, and every language
> > >has it's little pecularities.
> >
> > Well, there is one big difference syntactically: Python uses indentation
> > as syntax and Ruby doesn't.  Personally I don't prefer Python's
> > 'indentation-as-syntax' since it means that syntactically significant
> > pieces of my code are invisible and if the tab settings in my editor are
> > not the same as yours it can make it difficult to share code (or even
> > worse, it might look like everything is OK when we share code, but the
> > code which looks exactly the same to each of us, might not be depending
> > on how tabs are or are not expanded). It would also seem to be a pain for
> > cutting & pasting code as well.
>
>As I said in another post, indentation is the reason I learned
>Python in the first place, but it's not the reason I stay with
>the language. In fact, I've come to the very heretical view
>that the indentation sensitivity is a language design mistake.
>It should be the editor's job to handle that level of detail in
>a manner that the developer finds workable.
>
>One reason I think it's a language design mistake is that
>it's not recursive. That is, it's not possible to shift from
>expression level indentation back to statement level
>indentation without major disruptions. This is needed for
>embedded blocks.
>
>I think Ruby has a reasonable middle ground here: its use of
>'end' is fairly unobtrusive compared to, for example, C, C++,
>C# or Java. Even so, I think that a reasonable programming
>editor would get them out of my face while I was programming.
>
>The tab issue is one of those relatively inconsequential things
>that people seem to love to argue about: I'd rather be able to
>tell the editor how I want the program formatted, and have done
>with it.

I totally agree.

But if your editor cannot manage "end" and indent for
you, at least your pretty-printer can. I find it a great
consolation to tailor my pretty-printer to display the
code with my preferred syntax/style.

As an example, mime transforms hash of symbols to display them
using Ruby 2's syntax:
{ :a => "1", :b => "2", :c => "3"} is displayed as:
{ a: "1", b: "2", c: "3" }
I get today some of the benefits of tomorrow ;-)

For as unobtrusive as it is today, "end", is still something
that annoy some people (not me). It is a shame that {} cannot be used
instead because supporting {} would attract more people to Ruby than
any other feature (my guess) !

In addition to indentation and closing blocks, a decent editor should
handle folding (more and more frequently done) and hiding (filtering out
some part of the code, comments for example).

I still wonder why most editors don't try to guess my indentation
style (which is of 2 chars) looking at the code (an either using
the code's style or my imposed one, that way tab could stay 8 as
ANSI defined).

Jean-Hugues