Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to have just a bit more syntactic flexibility.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:32:53 -0800, Steve Howell wrote:

> The extra expressiveness of Ruby comes from the fact that you can add
> statements within the block, which I find useful sometimes just for
> debugging purposes:
> 
>     debug = true
>     data = strange_dataset_from_third_party_code() 
>     data.each { |arg|
>         if debug and arg > 10000
>             puts arg
>         end
>         # square the values
>         arg * arg
>     }

How is that different from this?

debug = true
data = strange_dataset_from_third_party_code() 
for i, arg in enumerate(data):
    if debug and arg > 10000
        print arg
    # square the values
    data[i] = arg * arg


I don't see the extra expressiveness. What I see is that the Ruby snippet 
takes more lines (even excluding the final brace), and makes things 
implicit which in my opinion should be explicit. But since I'm no Ruby 
expert, perhaps I'm misreading it.


-- 
Steven