Whither SmallScript? (was Re: Integer micro-benchmarks)

[Andrew Hunt]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001 14:02:27 -0400, 
Steven D. Majewski <sdm7g at Virginia.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Andrew Hunt wrote:
> 
> > I personally like the style and dynacism of Ruby.  For instance, to declare
> > a class that inherits from another class you simply have:
> > 
> > class Foo < Bar
> > 	def myMethod
> > 		File.new ("test.dat", "w") { |f| 
> > 			f.puts "Hello world!"
> > 		}
> > 	end
> > end
> 
> What do the vertical bars around the f  ("|f|") above indicate ? 

A local variable to the block, used to pass the parameter from File.new.

> ( Maybe it's those extra non alphanumeric operator looking chars
> that make folks think of Perl -- even if they are used differently, 
> to someone that doesn't read Ruby, it looks like more "line noise".)

Doesn't Smalltalk use vertical bars as well?  I don't think that
qualifies as line noise.  The @-prefix on instance variables might,
and I'll admit to not liking that very much when I first saw Ruby.
However, most Java or C++ programs I've seen tend to use *some* sort
of naming convention for instance variables, either myFoo or _Foo or
something like that.  Given the choice between myFoo and @foo, I'll
take @foo.

/\ndy