Re: Perl and Ruby

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "hy" == YAMAGATA Hiroo <hiyori13@example.com> writes:

    hy> What would be the weak point of Ruby that people see? I know
    hy> this may be flame bait, but I'm curious.

Well, as someone who has only looked at it briefly, I can say that my
surface impression was that it didn't seem different enough from say
Perl to be worth dealing with some of the different ways of expressing
the same kinds of thing.  Some of them seemed either stylistically or
semantically bogus, although I haven't thought carefully about any of
them.  Examples:

(style) We already have a number of different ways of expressing
non-local exits (break n, try ... throw ... catch, longjmp(), etc) and
I thought ruby's "rescue" keyword was gratuitously different.

(style) The "case ... when" construct bugs me because it's
ungrammatical.

(semantics) The exit! Kernel function is unnerving, because it allows
"ensure" promises to be broken.  Ditto the "untaint" method for
objects, which allows an object to decide for itself whether it is
safe.

(style, XEmacsish Ebola aversion) The Emacs notation for characters
(\C-\M-a = the ASCII value of 'a' plus 128 anded with ~0x60) seems
inappropriate outside of the keyboard context.

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