Why Ruby?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2010-12-13 11:50, Stephan Soller wrote:
> On 12.12.2010 21:17, spir wrote:
>> On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:23:03 -0600
>> Andrei Alexandrescu<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Going now
>>> back to D, we can imagine the following lowering:
>>>
>>> fun (a, b ; c) stmt
>>>
>>> =>
>>>
>>> fun(c, (a, b) { stmt })
>>
>> It seems to me that lowering is analog to redefine "shallow" syntax
>> (in fact, syntactic sugar) into a deeper syntax mirroring that actual
>> AST. The syntax tree for foreach/iteration could be written as:
>>
>> iteration:
>> collection: c
>> loopVarNames: ['a','b']
>> block: stmt
>>
>> And generalised into:
>>
>> blockOperation:
>> source: c
>> loopVarNames: ['a','b']
>> block: stmt
>> where your 'func' is a "block-wise operation". What do you think?
>>
>> But I do not see in what Ruby-like syntax and point of view are
>> clearer; actally, I find D far more readable.
>> And even less what this would bring to D. This is interesting in
>> highly reflexive languages; even more reflexive than Ruby in fact,
>> where one could tweak the block at runtime. But this is not the
>> perspective of D, I guess.
>>
>>
>> Denis
>> -- -- -- -- -- -- --
>> vit esse estrany ☣
>>
>> spir.wikidot.com
>>
>
> I think it's a matter of consistency. In Ruby blocks are used all the
> time for pretty much everything. In D this isn't the case because
> usually templates are used for stuff where blocks are used in Ruby (e.g.
> map, group and find in std.algorithm).

I think that the templates that take a string as a predicate is just an 
ugly hack because D has a too verbose delegate syntax.

> I don't know if it's possible to unify the way to "pass code as an
> argument" in D but that's where Ruby really shines in my opinion:
> consistency in usage.
>
> Happy programming
> Stephan Soller


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg