Why Ruby?

[lurker]

Nick Sabalausky Wrote:

> "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.

=> would make D look like Perl or PHP or Ruby. Statements are more general than expressions, the D's solution is more general. How much the short new syntax matters if you need two syntaxes for it?! Would mean 2 function syntaxes, 2 delegate syntaxes. Two things was already complex for users.