Re: (OT -- ruby) Re: Re: Favorite programming language, other than Perl:

[elusion]

I am one monk who feels strongly about Ruby -- strongly in favor. My main project right now (I'm a teenager -- no job) is in Ruby, so I've gotten to know if fairly well.

As to the lack of documentation. It's true that there's not a lot, but what's out there is good stuff. And the Pragmatic Programmer's guide may be a year old, but it most certainly is not a year out of date. After all, languages don't change that much.

It is possible to receive a block and then pass it on, it's just not introductory guide material. :-) Here's an example

class Foo
     def initialize #no initialization needed for this class
     end

     def bar(&block)
         self.baz(&block)
     end

     def baz
          yield(3)
     end
end

foo = Foo.new
foo.bar { |n| puts n } # prints "3\n"

When you talk about adding a local variable that masks calls to an earlier added function of the same name, you forget something: Ruby is an object-oriented langauge. You're supposed to call functions on objects, which can't be confused with a variable. In a class definition, you call one of that class's methods like self.method or like method, which is merely a shortcut for the former. It calls that method with that instance from the class.

This was also discussed at Ruby: An Abbot breaks silencewind. If you haven't checked it out, check it out. It's not better or worse than Perl -- it's different, and I love them both.

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com

[educated_foo]

Re passing blocks: thanks. Got that part working.

But about the other, I probably need to clarify a bit. The example in the doc was the following:

def a
  print "Function 'a' called\n"
  99
end for i in 1..2
  if i == 2
    print "a=", a, "\n"
  else
    a = 1
    print "a=", a, "\n"
  end
end

Which prints:

a=1
Function 'a' called
a=99

Frankly, I think that's perverse, and object-orientation won't save you. What if, instead of printing, you'd tried to call "a.blah"? Presumably you'd get the same sort of bizarre results.

/s

[elusion]

Sorry, you missed my point. Maybe some code will help. :-)

class Foo
     def a
          puts "Function 'a' called"
     end
end

foo = Foo.new
(1..2).each do |i|
     if i == 2
          print "a=", foo.a, "\n"
     else
          a = 1
          print "a=", foo.a, "\n"
     end
end

which prints:

Function 'a' called
a=99
Function 'a' called
a=99

You see, functions are meant to belong to a class -- to be methods. Not that you can't declare functions that belong to the main class, but that's not what the design was for. So I guess if you're writing your code in a non-OO way, you could get stuck. But presumably your variable and function names will be better than 'a' :-).

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com