RE: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia
In Ruby, *everything* acts like an object reference, including function
references, so you get function pointers nearly for free.. (01)
There are a number of excellent books on Ruby, including one written by the
"Pragmatic Programmers" http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ . (02)
It looks to me like a cross between a really clean Perl and a rather pure
O-O language. (03)
The Pragmatic Programmers say that they tend to us Ruby for nearly all
programming where it is acceptable based on project parameters. (04)
Thanks, (05)
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson (06)
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org
[mailto:owner-ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org]On Behalf Of Eric Armstrong
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 7:04 PM
To: ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org
Subject: Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia (07)
And it has my beloved pattern match operator (=~) from
Snobol/Icon!!! (08)
X =~ /...somePattern.../ --- true if the pattern is found in string X (09)
And it wisely uses "==" for a boolean test, instead of the assignment
operator, "=". (010)
This is really great stuff. It looks like the best possible combination
of Java, Perl, Python, Awk, and Icon.... (011)
It's even got coroutines/function pointers. TOO cool. (It's been so
long since I could write them, though, that I'm going to have to figure
out how/when to use them from the beginning. But what I recall is
that on those rare occasions that a function pointer is needed,
*nothing* else works as well...) (012)
On the other hand, they implemented Perl's default $_ variable,
which takes values and acts as a parameter automatically.
Personally, I find that unfortunate. It means that programs will
only be understandable by those who are familiar with that
particular piece of magic. (I know it has made many a Perl
program difficult for me to read.) (013)
Hmmm. One more thing. Now that I've got to the discussion of
classes and overridding methods, I see O-O concepts being
introduced with very little in the way of explanation. For an
old-school programmer used to prodedural languages, I'd still
recommend the o-o concept chapters of my book. (I'll have to
see if I get IDG to let me put them on the web.) (014)