Why Ruby?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Jacob Carlborg" <doob at me.com> wrote in message 
news:ie8f5f$o6e$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Probably not, but, for example, Scala allows very compact delegate 
> literals:
>
> Array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).select(_ > 3).collect(_ * _)
>
> Or more verbose:
>
> Array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).select((x) => x > 3).collect((x, y) => x * y)
>
> I'm not 100% sure I that the syntax is correct.
>

I'd be surprised if the first one is correct, because that "collect(_ * _)" 
would seem highly limited (how would you use the same value twice, or use 
just the second value, or use them in reverse order?).

The second one reminds me of C#'s lambdas and seems like an excellent 
solution to the question of what to do with all the noise of the extra curly 
braces, "return" keyword and trailing semicolon. And given that 1. The => 
isn't currently a valid D token anyway, and 2. The (x) and (x,y) are already 
being used perfectly fine by the existing delegate literal syntax, I can't 
imagine there would be any ambiguity with it in D.

I'd be absolutely in favor of adding that to D. In fact, I'd love to see it 
happen. Just require that the part after "=>" is an expression, accept that 
the more complex delegates that need statements use the existing syntax 
(which should be fine since it's only the single-expression-and-nothing-else 
delegates that are seen as verbose in D), and call it a day.