<ale / crimson.propagation.net> wrote:
> Anyway, this bug doesn't bite too often by accident. If you adopt
> "right" style to write code (include operator or dot as a hint of
> continuation to the same line) it's very rare event you need
> '\'. During my sufficiently short Ruby career I can't remember using
> this notation more than two times.
> 
> Usually when a statement grows over line there's something in your
> code which uses it's last way of signalling it should be fixed.

I disagree with that, since it is in the style of functional programming to 
have a large "chain" of methods acting upon a series of lists (or, in Ruby's 
case, Arrays).  For example:

    def CDDB.from_sql(res)
        unsubber = lambda {|s|
            s.scan(/[^\\]("([^"\\]|\\.)*")/).
              collect {|e| e[0][1..-2].gsub(/\\(.)/, '\1')}
        }
        CDDBStruct.new(unsubber.call(res[0]), res[1], unsubber.call(res[2]),
          res[3], unsubber.call(res[4]),
          res[5][1..-2].split(',').collect {|x| x.to_i})
    end

You'll probably see even longer chains than that all the time, and in those 
cases I think that when a statement is more than a line because of this, 
it's specifically doing things right!

-- 
 Brian Fundakowski Feldman           \  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!  /
 green / FreeBSD.org                    `------------------------------'