Re: [C&C] Re: [tlug] OT: interesting NY times article:High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-05-28 03:03 +0900 (Wed), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Does Ruby also provide a method with the same signature that mutates
> the string in-place?

Ruby provides plenty of those methods.

However, they seem to me to be more explicit than perl's; that meaning
that when you do something to mutate a string, it's more obvious that
you're doing it. I got nailed a while back (I think it's all in the
archives here) by perl mutating a bunch of strings on me that were three
or four list mapping operations away when I was trying merely to get
new copies with certain edits applied. Tracking that down was highly
confusing because suddenly an apparently unrelated part of my program
stopped working. Ouch!

It's a pretty strong argument for the Haskell approach of making all
side-effects explicit.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com