[NCLUG] Looking at programming languages...

[Michael Milligan]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 01:21:57PM -0700, Chad Perrin wrote:
> 
>>The syntax is beautiful.  You just need to get into its mindset -- just
> 
> 
> The biggest problem I had when learning Ruby was the lack of parens in the
> examples of function calls.  In Ruby you can leave out the parens if it's
> obvious what is what.  However, when I read these I always found that I
> would go "WTF?" and have to go through and figure out what it really meant.
> 
> Maybe that's just me, but I found that the lack of parens got quite in the
> way of trying to learn it by example.  This isn't really a language
> problem, except that the language allows it.  This is more a problem I had
> with the Ruby examples.

I agree with you here... I'm a fan of Ruby now, but I've started always 
putting in the parens for maintainability's sake.  It makes it clear you 
are calling a method with arguments.  It gets especially hairy when you 
are chaining method calls, e.g..

if self.respond_to?(word.to_sym)
   r = self.method(word).call(arg.length == 0 || arg[0].chr == '/' ? 
name+arg : arg)
else
   # freak out with a parse error
end

My biggest problem with Python was the rigid indent style forced upon 
me, but I got over it pretty quick.  That's actually a very good thing 
for maintainability.

Regards,
Mike

-- 
Michael Milligan                                   -> milli at acmeps.com