Why Ruby?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2010-12-14 22:04, 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?).

I guess for anything more complicated you would have to use the => 
syntax. BTW, I just verified that this works:

Array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).sortWith(_ > _)

You can try it out for yourself at: http://www.simplyscala.com/

> 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.

I would also love to have that syntax. I also love the syntax I 
previously suggested in this thread, there are many to choose of.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg