On Oct 8, 2008, at 2:18 AM, Ryan Davis wrote:

>
> On Oct 2, 2008, at 07:45 , James Gray wrote:
>
>> On Oct 1, 2008, at 10:33 PM, Yusuke ENDOH wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> 2008/10/2 James Gray <james / grayproductions.net>:
>>>> I vote we use 1.9 as a good excuse to remove this dubious feature.
>>>
>>> Not at all.  1.9 has already been freezed.
>>> Have you ever suggested this on the ml?  If you haven't, it is
>>> completely too late.
>>
>> matz did:
>>
>> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/45253
>
> 6 years ago... c'mon. I think it is safe to assume that matz's words  
> or ideas are a tad more fluid than that.

My apologies.  I didn't mean to imply this is law.

What I wanted to show was that this isn't a new issue and at some  
point matz agreed that it caused problems.  I brought this up because  
it was suggested this is coming from me out of the blue.

If we've changed our mind and decided to keep this feature, well, now  
I know.  That's fine.

I admit that I wasn't aware this was a parse-time optimization.   
Knowing that at least helps me understand why we have it.

I still don't feel it's a great idea though.  I just don't feel it  
adds a lot over String#+.  Speed is nice, but I just don't see this  
feature used much and if we have long complicated String literals we  
probably want those in a file most of the time anyway, I assume.

On the flip side, I have run into this "feature" multiple times in  
error. It's just too easy to drop a comma between two literals.  My  
opinion is that those errors are hard to notice because of this feature.

I don't feel the tradeoff is worth it.  That's my opinion though, so  
take it as you will.

James Edward Gray II